One of the most crucial tasks we face is to clean up the enormous amounts of pollution that industrial processes & great amounts of ignorance have caused. So the technologies to do this work are some of the most important we need to know about & keep developing.
Phytoremediation (from Ancient Greek φυτο (phyto), meaning "plant", and Latin remedium, meaning "restoring balance") describes the treatment of environmental problems (bioremediation) through the use of plants that mitigate the environmental problem without the need to excavate the contaminant material and dispose of it elsewhere.
Phytoremediation consists of mitigating pollutant concentrations in contaminated soils, water, or air, with plants able to contain, degrade, or eliminate metals, pesticides, solvents, explosives,crude oil and its derivatives, and various other contaminants from the media that contain them.
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A range of processes mediated by plants or algae are useful in treating environmental problems: A range of processes mediated by plants or algae are useful in treating environmental problems:
Phytoextraction — uptake and concentration of substances from the environment into the plant biomass.
Phytostabilization — reducing the mobility of substances in the environment, for example, by limiting the leaching of substances from the soil.
Phytotransformation — chemical modification of environmental substances as a direct result of plant metabolism, often resulting in their inactivation, degradation (phytodegradation), or immobilization (phytostabilization).
Phytostimulation — enhancement of soil microbial activity for the degradation of contaminants, typically by organisms that associate with roots. This process is also known as rhizosphere degradation. Phytostimulation can also involve aquatic plants supporting active populations of microbial degraders, as in the stimulation of atrazine degradation by hornwort.
Phytovolatilization — removal of substances from soil or water with release into the air, sometimes as a result of phytotransformation to more volatile and/or less polluting substances.
Rhizofiltration — filtering water through a mass of roots to remove toxic substances or excess nutrients. The pollutants remain absorbed in or adsorbed to the roots.
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This Guide provides abstracts of over 100 phytoremediation overviews, field studies and demonstrations, research articles, and Internet resources. It also provides a brief summary of phytoremediation. Finally, a matrix is also provided to allow easy screening of the abstracted references.
see document attached, below, phytoresgude.pdf
Also see Regeneration
in this e-book