The power of plants

Café de Ceuvel in the north of Amsterdam is more than just a cozy café. It is located on a site that was previously contaminated by heavy industry. While guests drink their craft beer, phytoremediation cleans the soil.

The former Buiksloterham shipyard site, a district in the north of Amsterdam, has been attracting a lot of attention for several years now. A temporary, ecologically and socially sustainable location for social institutions and creative companies has been created here. Since 2012, De Ceuvel has been transforming itself from a contaminated industrial site into a place for sustainable living and working.

The contaminated soil is being cleaned up using phytoremediation, a relatively new approach to the biological remediation of contaminated soil. It comprises various processes in which pollutants in topsoil, sediments, water bodies and groundwater are removed, degraded and contained with the help of plants. Which plants are used depends on where they are used. In the case of De Ceuvel, various types of grasses, bulrushes and poplars were used to decompose organic compounds, absorb heavy metals and retain contaminated groundwater. As soon as a particular plant species has fulfilled its purification task, it is replaced by other species. As a result, the appearance and character of the site in question are subject to constant change.

Phytoremediation is also much cheaper in the long term than conventional methods, which remove contaminated topsoil layers and dispose of them in landfill sites, as it takes place on site. As a result, contaminated brownfield sites that could not be remediated until then due to a lack of funds are also coming into focus for reuse. Biological remediation is also much more attractive from an aesthetic point of view. In De Ceuvel, the variety of plants in different sizes, colors and shapes makes this immediately apparent. However, phytoremediation is a lengthy process. The degradation of pollutants can take years or even decades, depending on the level of pollutant concentration, the size of the area to be remediated, the climate and the growing season, as well as other factors such as the growth rate of the plants, the reach of their roots and the ability to protect them against damage.

All GIFs from Vandejong, Let it Grow, Mélanie Corre

More information on the De Ceuvel project in Amsterdam can be found in the November 2018 issue of Garten + Landschaft.