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Phytoremediation is the use of plants and plant processes to remove, degrade or render harmless hazardous materials present in the soil or water. Phytoremediation is a low cost, solar energy driven clean up technique.

The population increasing continuously and so we need more land, water, space and food across the world. Due to rapid industrialization and random urbanization environmental pollution has become a great problem.
There is an increasing trend in areas of land, surface waters and ground waters
affected by contaminants from industrial, military and agricultural activities.
The build up of toxic pollutants affects the natural resources as well as
ecosystem. The pollutants which affect our soil and water are basically organic
and inorganic pollutants.

Toxic heavy metal pollution is much more serious problem due to the non-degradable nature of metals. At high concentration all the metals are toxic to both animals and plant. Many diseases
like Itai-Itai and Minimata are very much famous caused by heavy metals.

There are various ways to mitigate the environmental pollution. Phytoremediation is the use of plants and plant processes to remove, degrade or render harmless hazardous materials present in
the soil or water. Phytoremediation a low cost, solar energy driven clean up
technique. Phytoremediation used for the removal of pollutants from both soil
and water. Some of the ornamental trees which have aesthetic effect and
tolerant to pollution have been screened and recommended for planting along the
roads like Ficus
(Ficus religiosa), Bergad (Ficus benghalensis), Neem (Azarachtica indica), Arjun (Terminalia arjuna), normal"">Techtona grandis etc. These trees also used as green
belts for minimizing air pollution by filtering, absorbing and adsorbing pollutants
in an effecting manner. Phytoremediation can be used to cleanup metals,
pesticides solvents, explosive, crude oil, polyaromatic hydrocarbon and land
fill leachates. Because of other commercial methods like microbial
decomposition the metals can not be degraded so phytoremediation is very
efficient method to remove / mitigate metal pollution.

After Phytoremediation:

The plants used for the phytoremediation do not remain to take as food or fodder for human as well as for animals. These plants burn in the safe site or dump out the areas where the buildings are going to be construct or it is also possible to extract the heavy metals by metallurgical processes.

A new research is also going on to generate bioenergy from the biomass produced by the phytoremediator plants after phytoremediation process. There are many high biomass producing plants like Ricinus communis (Castor) and Jatropha curcus has very good potential to accumulate the heavy metals which are non degradable and very hazardous (Studies are going on in our Lab also) and these plants are also using to produce the biofuel from the seeds. These plants having high biomass, may be used for biogas (Bioenergy from biomass).