COAL COMBUSTION PRODUCTS UTILIZATION FOR SOIL AMENDMENT

Abstract

Nowadays, coal has a crucial role in generating energy all over the world. As a result, the consumption of coal creates a huge amount of coal combustion products, including bottom ash and fly ash. The coal ash has the potential characteristics to become a resource material in agriculture such as its texture, water holding capacity, bulk density, pH etc., and contains almost all the essential plant nutrients. However, most of the coal ash created is dumped into the landfill, which is a contributing factor in the environmental degradation. This study wants to use coal ash in agriculture as a way to dispose of coal ash and at the same time, it improves crops yield and physicochemical properties of soil. This research contains two main parts. The first part measures the effect of coal ash on soil properties of soil such as soil texture, pH, salinity, and bulk density. The second part is to evaluate the plant growth by measuring height and leaf size. The results of the experiment on soil properties show that the application of bottom ash and fly ash has a significant effect on soil texture, pH, salinity and bulk density of soil. For instance, the using of coal ash ranging from 5% wt. to 30% wt. improves bulk density of soil to a suitable condition for plant growth. This research recommends that this coal ash should be used with concentration less 5% wt. to avoid the soil become saline. From the result of growing plant, it is found that the case of bottom ash used at 5% wt. help to increase significantly the growth of Bird Pepper during the first three months of the study time. The combination of bottom ash and fertilizer in the mixture of soil, fertilizer and bottom ash by 90% wt., 5% wt., 5% wt., respectively shows the plant growth of Bird Peppers higher than that of the mixtures of fertilizer at 10% wt., 20% wt. in most of the study period. It means that bottom ash could be combined used with fertilizer to reduce production cost and increase crop yield. Furthermore, the application of fly ash does not help plants growing of both Bird Peppers and Holy Basil. From the results of this research, it is expected that bottom ash could be used wider in agriculture to bring more benefit and reduce environmental problems when disposes of coal ash.