Phytoremediation of Heavy Metal-Contaminated Soil Using Bioenergy Crops
Heavy metal contamination of soils affects large areas worldwide. Excessive amount of metals, whether essential or nonessential, adversely affects the health of wildlife, humans, and plants and makes the land unusable for agricultural production. Phytorem
- PDF / 710,743 Bytes
- 34 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 86 Downloads / 216 Views
Phytoremediation of Heavy Metal- Contaminated Soil Using Bioenergy Crops Ambuj Bhushan Jha, Amarendra Narayan Misra, and Pallavi Sharma
Abstract
Heavy metal contamination of soils affects large areas worldwide. Excessive amount of metals, whether essential or nonessential, adversely affects the health of wildlife, humans, and plants and makes the land unusable for agricultural production. Phytoremediation, a sustainable, environment-friendly, and potentially cost-effective technology, can be used to decontaminate heavy metal- contaminated land. Use of nonfood, dedicated bioenergy crops for remediation of heavy metal-polluted sites has the advantage that biomass produced can be used to generate bioenergy, a cheaper, safer, sustainable, and renewable energy source compared to fossil fuels, avoids direct competition with food, and uses land unsuitable for growing food crops. Identifying dedicated bioenergy crops suitable for a particular metal-contaminated land and strategies to increase their phytoremediation potential are important for the success of this approach. Some dedicated bioenergy crops including poplars (Populus spp.), willows (Salix spp.), elephant grass (Miscanthus × giganteus), castor bean (Ricinus communis), and switchgrass (Panicum virgatum) can tolerate high concentrations of heavy metal, accumulate metal, and grow well on contaminated lands. Phytoremediation potential of these crops can be further improved by the effective use of metal solubilizing agents, endophytic bacteria, and genetic engineering. A better understanding of the mechanisms of heavy metal uptake, translocation, accumu-
A.B. Jha Crop Development Centre/Department of Plant Sciences, University of Saskatchewan, 51 Campus Drive, Saskatoon, SK S7N 5A8, Canada A.N. Misra • P. Sharma (*) Centre for Life Sciences, Central University of Jharkhand, Brambe, Ranchi, Jharkhand 835205, India e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2017 K. Bauddh et al. (eds.), Phytoremediation Potential of Bioenergy Plants, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-3084-0_3
63
64
A.B. Jha et al.
lation, and tolerance in normal and metal hyperaccumulator plants will help scientists to develop effective and economic transgenic bioenergy crops for remediation of heavy metals in soil. Keywords
Bioenergy crops • Biomass • Heavy metals • Phytoremediation • Renewable energy
3.1
Introduction
Heavy metal-contaminated soil, a major problem worldwide, affects the health of humans, animals, and plants (Taiz and Zeiger 1998; Shah and Dubey 1998; Sharma and Dubey 2007). Among heavy metals, Pb, Cd, Cu, Hg, Ni, Al, Se, Zn, Cr, and As are most commonly found in soil and are known to exert their toxic symptoms (Scott and Smith 1981). Concentrations of heavy metals in soil vary from traces to 100,000 mg kg−1 (Blaylock and Huang 2000). Although, high concentrations of heavy metals are naturally present in some areas, discharge of heavy metals in the environment due to human activities is mainly responsible for continuous increase in soil metal contaminat
Data Loading...
