Hello, my partner and I recently purchased our dream 5-acre property in the high desert of New Mexico. Today I was working in the area we are planning to turn into our garden and found a large amount of insulation foam debris embedded in the soil. It is localized to a fairly small, roughly 6' x 8' location and seems to penetrate about a foot into the soil. The foam is pretty finely broken up and I can't see any way to isolate it from the soil. Furthermore, a small amount of foam on the surface has been blown around by the wind to cover a wider area. The contaminated spot had previously been home to a hot tub on a wooden platform that was torn down a few months ago -- I assume that this is from where the foam originated rather than as, say, a misguided soil amendment. I take the risk of asbestos to be fairly low as the house was built in the 90s long after asbestos was phased out, but out of an abundance of caution ordered a test kit anyway.
I still want to go forward with using this site as a garden. My assumption is that the only solution to this is to excavate the contaminated area and replace it with uncontaminated soil. How concerned do I need to be about capturing and removing all of the debris? I hate the idea of putting soil in a landfill but I also am not too keen on tucking this away on a corner of our land and letting it continue to be tossed around by the wind. Should I bag it and take it to the dump?
