Decommissioning of the potash mining sites requires that the slime tailings be reclaimed. A number of tactics have been tried to date with negligible success. In 1996 a greenhouse study using the soil amendment cross-linked polyacrylamide hydrogel (X-LPAM) was tested to determine if it could be used to create soil structure thereby allowing the slime, or marine sediment, to be leached of its high salt load. The greenhouse study indicated that the 0.2% (polymer wt./soil wt.) addition of X-LPAM was the most successful in reclamation of the sediment. Due to these results, the decision by the potash industry, SERM, and SnF Floerger (the company supplying the polymer), was to try a field experiment to see if these positive results could be replicated under field conditions.