Phytoremediation and its models for organic contaminated soils

Abstract

Soil pollution has been attracting considerable public attentions over the last decades. Sorts of traditional physiochemical methods have been used to remove the organic pollutants from soils. However, the enormous costs and low efficiencies associated with these remediation technologies limit their availabilities. Phytoremediation is an emerging technology that uses plants to cleanup pollutants in soils. As overwhelmingly positive results have been shown, phytoremediation is a most economical and effective remediation technique for organic contaminated soils. In this paper phytoremediation and its models for organic contaminated soils are viewed. The mechanisms of phytoremediation mainly include the direct plant uptake of organic pollutants, degradation by plant-derived degradative enzymes, and stimulated biodegradation in plant rhizosphere. Phytoremediation efficiency is close related to physicochemical properties of organic pollutants, environmental characteristics, and plant types. It is no doubt that soil amendments such as surfactants improves the solubilities and availabilities of organic pollutants in soils. However, little information is available about effects of soil amendments on phytoremediation efficiencies. Phytoremediation models have been developed to simulate and predict the environmental behavior of organic pollutants, and progress of models is illustrated. In many ways phytoremediation is still in its initial stage, and recommendations for the future research on phytoremediation are presented.