Green remediation: Using plants to clean the soil
- Department of Agriculture-Agricultural Research Service, Greenbelt, MD (United States)
Rufus Chaney has his eye on plants with a lusty appetite for toxic heavy materials. Chaney foresees a day when these remarkable plants will be used to clean contaminated soils at smelter and mining sites, landfills, nuclear waste dumps, farmland, or at any urban or rural site contaminated with lead, cadmium, zinc, nickel, or radioactive isotopes such as uranium or cobalt. The plants would take up the toxic metals or isotopes through their roots and transport them to stems or leaves where they could be easily removed by harvesting. A U.S. Department of AGriculture agronomist, Chaney says the cost of using plants to clean polluted soil {open_quotes}could be less than one-tenth the price tag for either digging up and trucking the soil to a hazardous waste landfill or making it into concrete.{close_quotes} Chaney, a heavy-metals expert at USDA`s Agricultural Research Service Environmental Chemistry Laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland, says the cost could be further offset by recovering heavy metals from the plants and selling them. The metal-scavenging plants, called hyperaccumultors, would be grown and harvested like hay, Chaney says. {open_quotes}Burning the hay allows recovery and recycling of the metals. The ash is similar to commercial ore and could be sold as {open_quote}Bio-Ore{close_quote}.{close_quotes} Chaney calls the process {open_quotes}green remediation.{close_quotes} He says that without intervention, heavy metals stay in soil for centuries.
- OSTI ID:
- 273884
- Journal Information:
- Journal of Soil and Water Conservation, Vol. 51, Issue 3; Other Information: PBD: May-Jun 1996
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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