The Genius of Cleaning the Dirt

Ed Ring writes in the ecoworld website about a California man who has come up with a big idea.

EarthWorks Continues Crusade to take their
Revolutionary Soil Treatment Worldwide

Wouldn’t it be better to clean and reuse contaminated soil?

What if toxins could be inexpensively removed from soil, on-site, instead of being hauled to a landfill? This is the vision that inspired Jonathan Brewer to found EarthWorks Environmental in 1998, and in barely four years his small company has treated over 50 million pounds of contaminated soil. Based in Sacramento, California, Brewer’s company offers a unique and patented innovation, whereby mining equipment used to crush ore is adapted to grind up soil so that chemical or biological reagents can be sprayed onto the fine particles, neutralizing the toxins.

This new approach to soil remediation is again attracting customers faster than Brewer can serve them, allowing him to live his dream of “growing and becoming financially successful by cleaning up the planet.”

Mainstream methods of soil remediation either require permanent, and very expensive, removal of the contaminated soil, or they require “washing” the soil in cumbersome tanks. Brewer’s machines are fully self-contained, and can be easily transported directly to the contaminated sites, where the soil requiring treatment can be scooped onto a conveyance hopper and fed through the grinders and sprayers, coming out the other end completely treated.

Where a soil washing system might be capable of cleaning 500 tons of soil per day, Brewer’s latest machine can clean 200 tons of soil or more per hour! “We can eliminate any toxin for which there is a chemical or biological methodology to degrade,” said Brewer, and that’s almost everything out there.