The importance of soil to landscape design cannot be overestimated. While the air and water are more or less the same at each job site, there are dozens of variables which govern the quality of the soil and by extension, the quality of the landscaping at the site. A Landscape Architect friend recently told me that up to 80 percent of the time, energy and money spent on a major job had gone to site preparation and soil amendments. “Good soil and bad plants beats bad soil and good plants any day of the week,” he said.

In any natural ecosystem, leaves, stems and other dead plant material are constantly falling to earth and being broken down by soil microorganisms. The end result of this natural composting is humus, a rich, dense form of organic matter which can bond with clay and silt particles to form the larger irregular-shaped colloidal particles which give a soil what is called “tilth.” You can tell a soil’s tilth by taking a handful and compressing it. A soil with good tilth will compress together (unlike sand), but not stick together in a tight ball (like clay).

“We are running out of landfill space.”

In most developed and highly populated areas, the natural cycle of organic matter being reintroduced to the soil on a regular basis has been broken by obsessive paving and raking up of dead plant matter. The organic matter (primarily leaves on the East coast, in the West mostly tree trimmings and grass clippings) is treated as garbage, and is either burned or thrown in the local landfill. The effect on the soil is rapid and thorough, though not irreversible.

Of course, at the same time the green industry designers and workers find themselves having to deal with a dearth of good soils and have been (literally) reduced to breaking up soil with jackhammers in order to plant gardens. There is a terrible problem going on in the nation’s waste management system. This problem was best symbolized by the Long Island garbage barge which made national news in its search for a place to put its cargo. Although the fate of that particular boat was sensationalized, the reason it was turned away from port after port was not adequately explored in most press accounts. Perhaps this is because the reasons are both too simple and too immediate to make good “popular press” reading.

With a few simple calculations, one can see how outlandish the cost of throwing out our garbage has become. The “tipping fee” for the privilege of dumping at the landfill has increased anywhere from 100 to 1,000 percent across the country. And the cost of getting the waste to the increasingly distant sites has also increased. I know of one case where an industrial process (the manufacture of aluminum oxides for the Silicon Valley industry) was nearly shut down simply by the cost of disposing the non-hazardous residue of the process (over $80 per ton).

?EUR??,,????'??The colloquial terms is ?EUR??,,????'??growing pains?EUR??,,????'???...?EUR??,,????'??

Of course, the popular alternative to landfilling is burning. Sometimes called waste-to-energy processing, burning presents its own ironic problems. If the burning process is regulated well, and the scrubbers at the top of the smokestack are efficient at trapping the poisons released by burning, then the left-over ash is concentrated toxic material which then must be disposed of as hazardous waste. If the burning process is inefficient, then the toxics are released into the air. It has been estimated that even “good” burning procedures only reduce waste volume by 50 percent, partly because the volume of ash left is so great, partly because many “trash” items like refrigerators, stoves and paint cannot be burned.

Rarely do problems and solutions find each other painlessly. The colloquial term is “growing pains” after all, not “growing pleasures.” The need for good soil and quality organic amendments on the one hand and the problem of disposing of organic byproducts on the other seem to defy this rule. With the attention of entrepreneurs and soil scientists, there is no reason why the solution of each of these problems should not contribute to the solution of the other.

I?EUR??,,????'???m often asked, “If this is such a good idea, how is it that everyone wasn?EUR??,,????'???t doing it ten years ago?” And the answer is simply that perhaps it wasn?EUR??,,????'???t a good idea ten years ago. The cost of throwing material away was less, so there was no incentive to think of alternatives. It seems to me singularly elegant and timely that the most feasible and cost-efficient solution will have such positive benefits to those who appreciate good soil.

Adam Davis is the general manager of American Soil Products in Berkeley, California.