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Bioremediation refers to solving
environmental problems utilizing living organisms. Most commonly either bacteria
or plants can be incorporated in waste clean-ups. Bioremediation encompasses any
use of any life to remedy a problem; phytoremediation includes only the use of
plants in a solution.
Two strategies: extraction and degradation can be incorporated. Phytoextraction
concentrates the waste from a site in a particular plant so that the plant must
be harvested to detoxify the site. As an example, sunflowers amazingly
concentrate uranium, cesium & strontium from radioactive wastes in water and
ground water. If economically feasible, the toxic metal, for example, can be
recovered from the plant and reused. Otherwise the plants with the wastes must
be disposed of in a hazardous waste facility.
Phytodegradation refers to plants that incorporate organic wastes and convert
them to harmless materials. For example, several marsh plants such as cattails
absorb oil and transmission fluid that has dripped from parked cars and washed
into the wetland from a shopping center parking lot. The cattails break down the
waste oils. Some shopping centers now build mitigation ponds that collect rain
run off from their parking lot. Admirably this cleans the water that pours into
the local watershed.
Bioremediation costs much less than alternative chemical clean-ups, often only
one tenth as much.
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Philosophy
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