Civil engineers work to make Detroit-grown produce safer

In recent years, the city of Detroit has gained national attention for its urban gardens, which have cropped up in increasing numbers on abandoned lots all over the city. By taking over unused land and giving citizens control of their own food supply, these gardens offer a healthy alternative to both the processed foods and overpriced produce from urban grocery stores, as well as an opportunity for residents to learn how to become more self-sufficient.

However, as the Detroit farming trend grows, concerns over contaminants found in urban environments have also increased. Contaminants like lead and arsenic are prevalent in the city's soil and can be potentially hazardous to anyone who consumes produce grown in it. Researchers in the WSU Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering are working in collaboration with Wayne State faculty and students from across many disciplines on ways to make urban gardening safer.

SEED Wayne, a program through the Wayne State College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, is dedicated to building collaborative, sustainable food systems on the campus of WSU and in Detroit's neighborhoods. "Through her SEED Wayne project, Kami has come into issues with possible contamination within the urban environment," says McElmurry. "So she and I got together and talked about some of these issues."

The engineering research that took place in summer 2010 consisted of two projects: designing and building a rooftop garden structure capable of harvesting enough rainwater to be self-sufficient, and quantifying potential exposure from contaminated soils through laboratory and field experiments at existing gardens in Detroit.

One of the primary issues with lead in soil is not the amount of lead transported into the plant through the roots, but rather the amount of lead that attaches to the outside of the plant by splashing or through air deposition. Monaghan's tests measured the amount of lead deposited through plant roots and the amount that is deposited through external forces, with the ultimate goal of finding more efficient solutions for preventing these two types of depositions.

According to McElmurry, reducing bioavailability of contaminants in soil needs to be considered a long-term goal for urban agriculture. He hopes to test for other types of contaminants that can be found in Detroit, such as cadmium and arsenic, and begin to find engineering solutions to decrease the bioavailability of these contaminants and mitigate potential routes of exposure.

"The fact of the matter is, even if we're just looking at lead, a large portion of Detroit has lead contamination," McElmurry says. "So we need to come up with an engineering solution that might be able to help reduce lead exposure."