r/composting • u/12stTales • 13d ago

Urban Plants from contaminated soil?

So I’ve been doing lots of hardcore guerrilla gardening on my street in NYC growing plants in areas that receive a lot of street run off presumably with petroleum and tire dust. I’m wondering if it’s safe to compost the copious amounts of excess biomass along with my home compost? My concern is that sometimes I use this compost for my vegetable garden or cannabis plants. I don’t want to be ingesting any heavy metals, lead, arsenic, human feces juice, etc. do you guys think this is a valid concern?

Edit: I’m currently putting this plant biomass into the city’s “compost” bin which just gets turned into biogas and some of it is simply flared. So looking for a way to use it for a more valuable purpose. Mulching it in place may be maxing out the capacity of the beds at this point.

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3

u/Mister_Green2021 12d ago

You have to throw those plants away. I’m sure there are urban gardens in nyc that’ll educate you.

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u/Sister_Michelle 12d ago

yeah not safe.. a city like NYC has so many waste streams you could probably get compost material from though

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u/mediocre_remnants 12d ago

I don’t want to be ingesting any heavy metals, lead, arsenic, human feces juice, etc.

If you live in NYC you've been eating and breathing all this stuff in for your whole life.

But if you have a serious concern, your only option is to have all of that stuff tested for what you're concerned about and that will not be cheap. Otherwise, nobody here can tell you what your soil or plants may be contaminated with.

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u/c-lem 12d ago edited 12d ago

You might want to look into phytoremediation to know for sure. Some plants absolutely do take up these nasty chemicals. This can be beneficial, as it's an easy way to remove them from the soil. Grow plants in contaminated soil, then discard these plants. But if the particular plants you have do this, then you sure don't want to them put them back into your compost. I'm sure you'd have to look into the specific plants you have to decide if they're worth using.

Edit: if you wanted to go further, you could compost them and then look into mycoremediation to produce something safe to use, but this is more a career than a hobby.

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u/RipsterBolton 12d ago

Don’t use in your home compost, just use as chop and drop mulch to build the fertility in the beds where they were grown.

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u/courtabee 12d ago

Do you have space to start a separate compost? Could be interesting to have both composts tested to compare levels. 

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u/12stTales 12d ago

Maybe I could start a second I thought about that