Excerpt
Phytoremediation uses plants to remove or degrade pollutants in the environment. These days, it''s not just the plants growing. David J. Glass, a remediation market analyst, projected the U.S. phytoremediation market would expand more than ten-fold between 1998 and 2005, to over $214 million. Researchers like Schwab are matching plants to pollutants, in an effort to increase phytoremediation's effectiveness. Currently, grasses, poplars, cotton-woods, and other plants are cleaning up heavy metals, chemical solvents, explosives, petroleum hydrocarbons, and pesticides.
Two years after the Texas planting, it's easy to see why phytoremediation is attractive. The St. Augustine and milo, along with a winter planting of rye, reduced contaminants by 75 percent. Meanwhile, a control plot's contaminants declined only 45 percent through “intrinsic bioremediation”—a fancy way of saying that the soil's natural microbes did their thing.
In this case, the initial oil spill clean-up had left the farmer with polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), heavy petroleum compounds that are considered carcinogenic. “The PAHs are rings of carbon that are hsed together, and without help such as phytoremediation, many of these compounds can persist for …
Footnotes
Loriee D. Evans is a freelance writer based out of St. Louis, Missouri.
- Copyright 2002 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society
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