THE GUARDIAN - It almost looked like a garden. In Taylor Yard, a former railyard near downtown Los Angeles, volunteers knelt down to tend to scrubby plants growing in neat rows under the sweltering sun.
But beneath the concrete of the 60-acre site overlooking the Los Angeles River, the soils were soaked with an assortment of hazardous heavy metals and petrochemicals like lead, cadmium, diesel and benzene. As the volunteers worked to dig up entire plants for closer study – some with roots nearly 12ft deep – they wore protective gear and carefully avoided inhaling or touching the toxic soil. Even a brief exposure to the contaminants could cause serious health consequences.
The volunteers were part of a study led by Danielle Stevenson, a researcher with the environmental toxicology department at the University of California, Riverside, investigating how native California plants and fungi could be used to clean up contaminated brownfields: land abandoned or underutilized due to industrial pollution. There are nearly half a million registered brownfields in the United States, about 90,000 of them in California alone. Typically, they are concentrated near or within low-income communities and communities of color, leading to disparate health impacts such as increased likelihood of cancers.