Phytoremediation uses plants to remove pollutants from the environment. The use of metal-accumulating plants to clean soil and water contaminated with toxic metals is the most rapidly developing component of this environmentally friendly and cost-effective technology. The recent discovery that certain chelating agents greatly facilitate metal uptake by soil-grown plants can make this technology...

Approximatelly 0.6 million tons of petroleum is poured into soil, groundwater, rivers and oceans every year in China. A large amount of the oil contaminated soil has not been remediated. The contaminated soil poses a severe threat to the environment and must be taken care of. Bioremediation has become one of the most popular and promising technologies with growing demand for the remediation of ...

Many organic chemicals have known human and environmental health hazards. At sites where chemicals have historically been stored, mixed and transferred, spills have often occurred. A primary route for human exposure to hazardous chemicals is by drinking groundwater which has been contaminated due to spills onto soil (Wilson et al., 1986) Due to the potential human health risks associated with e...

Environmental pollutants have received considerable attention due to their serious effects on human health. There are physical, chemical, and biological means to remediate pollution; among them, bioremediation has become increasingly popular. The nitrogen-fixing rhizobia are widely distributed in the soil and root ecosystems and can increase legume growth and production by supplying nitrogen, r...

Use and misuse of pharmaceuticals, pesticides, and petrochemicals by man is causing havoc with nature, as they persist as such or as their toxic metabolites. These pollutants bioaccumulate in environment, and they ultimately reach man through various means. They are hazardous because of potential toxicity, mutagenicity, carcinogenicity, and genotoxicity. To rejuvenate nature, remediation method...

The successful functioning of a bioretention system depends on the use of suitable soil media. Predictive computer modelling of a bioretention system (e.g. using the MUSIC software) assumes specific characteristics of the soil media to achieve a certain level of stormwater treatment. Therefore, the soil media used in the construction of a bioretention system must exhibit the required characteri...

Soil quality is critical to the management of urban green space, in particular, along traffic corridors where traffic-related air pollution is significant. Soil quality can be evaluated by soil enzyme activities, which show quick responses to both natural and anthropogenic disturbances. In this study, we investigated three soil enzyme activities (i.e., dehydrogenase, catalase and urease) along ...

Published in J. Nat. Resour. Life Sci. Educ. 33:51–53 (2004). http://www.JNRLSE.org © American Society of Agronomy 677 S. Segoe Rd., Madison, WI 53711 USA OVER THE PAST FEW DECADES, pollution has become a major threat to human and environmental health. Billions of acres of otherwise arable land lie uncultivated because of contaminants in the soil. However, remediation of contaminated land with ...

Information about in situ toxicity of the bioavailable pools of adsorptive soil pollutants is a prerequisite for proper ecological risk assessment in contaminated soils. Such toxicity data may be obtained by assays allowing for direct exposure of introduced test microorganisms to the toxicants, as they appear in solid solution equilibria in the natural soil. We describe a novel sensitive solid-...