Australia (Commonwealth Union) – The accumulation of pollutants within the soil, air and the ocean has been a major obstacle to life in all forms. Plastic pollution has been a particular problem for both land and oceans as they are mostly non-biodegradable and can last for decades. Researchers led by University of South Australia (UniSA) have pioneered a new soil remediation method, that’s significantly quicker, simpler, safer, and more economical in comparison to presently used techniques.
A recent report by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization indicates soil pollution as a significant threat to the worldwide formation of safe and sufficient food, and notes that taking out pollutants from soil is presently “a technically complex and extremely expensive procedure” that can go from tens of thousands to hundreds of millions of USD every year.
UniSA-led researchers, including Associate Professor Haolan Xu and Dr Gary Owens, developed a new remediation technique that utilizes a super-efficient solar evaporation surface to draw water from the soil via a sponge-like filter that traps contaminants, copying the process of transpiration occurring naturally in plants, but at a much quicker rate.
Dr Owens stated that plants naturally take mineral components from the soil when they move water from the roots to the stems, leaves and flowers, where those mineral particles are trapped. “This means plants can be used to extract contaminants from soil, but the process is very, very slow, often taking multiple growing seasons, particularly in heavily contaminated situations, where the soil toxicity means the plants struggle to grow and often die,” said Dr Owens.
Globally, over 10 million sites have been considered soil polluted, with over half contaminations with heavy metals like cadmium and lead, or metalloids. The new technique has the ability to take out such contaminants in as little as 2 weeks by applying a super-efficient solar evaporation surface to rapidly pull-out water and contaminants of the soil into a biomimetic plant body.
