Many soils throughout the world are contaminated with metal salts of diverse toxicity. We have developed an experiment to demonstrate the removal of a metal from an insoluble surrogate soil pollutant, CuCO[subscript 3] multiplied by Cu(OH)[subscript 2], by complexation followed by the simultaneous electrochemical recovery of the ligand (i.e., EDTA) and of the metal in its elemental form (i.e., Cu[superscript 0]). We have calculated speciation diagrams to predict appropriate conditions and to interpret the results. (Contains 3 figures.)