Japanese knot weed remains a major topic of control in Freiburg regional council. The extremely positive experiences using various steaming experiments against the pest introduced has additionally persuaded public providers to now gradually speed up the decontamination of large quantities of cuttings using superheated steam.
Soil steamin specialist, Steffen Koch, was commissioned with his company, mobildampf, in July 2015 to treat a 500m³ substrate on the River Elz using pure steam and therefore safely killing all germinable parts of plants, most notably the rhizome of Japanese knot weed to ensure that the soil can be moved and deposited.
With a large scale plant, company MSD Corp. was able to treat the entire volume of soil using superheated steam with a steam output of 2,000kg/h within four days, which will be completely free from invasive neophytes. For this reason, approximately 80m³ of substrate was deposited and covered. Using specialised hollow steam injection lances, which can even be driven several metres into the mound of earth awaiting steam treatment, the steam was introduced. In the process, steaming time lasted a maximum of 2.5 hours. Heating oil consumption is an average of ~4 litres per m³.