Analysis of Phytoremediation Potential of Crop Plants in Industrial Heavy Metal Contaminated Soil in the Upper Mures River Basin

Abstract

Phytoremediation represents an efficient ecological solution for treating the polluted soils through the use of plants. This is a passive process, with low costs, appropriate for the limitation of the risk of hazardous wastes in the case of in-depth contaminated soil. This paper presents a research with a novel result on soil remediation through phytoremediation in the upper Mures river basin, situated in the east-central Romania. The research focuses on the experiments performed using the following three crops: spring wheat, spring rape and soybean for the phytoremediation of polluted soil by the following combination of heavy metals: As, Cd, Cr, Cu, Pb, Zn and Ni. The main objective was to determine the ability of the studied crop plants cultures in the climate region of Mures County to reduce the heavy metals concentration in soils contaminated by industrial activities. The proposed phytoremediation solution enables efficient remediation of soils polluted by the activities of chemical platforms located in the upper Mures river basin, giving to the treated soil the potential of natural preservation of its physical, chemical and biological properties. The obtained research results show that the phytoremediation potential of the heavy metals, except the nickel, for the three plants, is similar (it is not statistically different) in the neighbourhood regions of the two studied chemical platforms. The choice of one of the three plants for phytoremediation should be made based on other considerations than the phytoremediation potential, like the financial investment, etc.

Keywords: anthropic risk, environmental management, environmental statistics, industrial pollution, outlier detection, phytoremediation, relational database