A current issue in the Townsville region is the harmful and unproductive methods to improve crop yields and lawn resilience. Townsville as a whole is a clay dominated soil, very little of our rainfall actually infiltrates or soaks into the soil. As a result, fertilizers are used to assist in achieving healthy vegetation. Combining poor absorbency of Townsville soil with these chemicals has harmful impacts on the wider environment, most notably the Great Barrier Reef, considering we are located within its catchment area.  

What does Atlas Soils do to reduce this impact? By taking the city’s organic waste, we can use biology to advance a process that would naturally take 50 years to complete. Instead of moving this organic waste to the local dump, Atlas Soil brings the waste material to our site and prepares it to be embedded with a very specific concentration of microbes. The waste is then covered in tarps as these microbes complete a 50-year natural process in as little as six months, after which, we are left with high-quality soil. This method is still entirely natural, as the added microbes simply amplify the process in order to achieve the results in a timelier manner. This soil is better for crop yield and lawn resilience than Townsville’s natural supply. In addition, we’re avoiding the cost of fertilizers, we’re reducing the side effects of fertilizer run-off, and we’re creating an economy around waste to get there.