Decontamination of Nickel Toxicity of Soil by Chelate Assisted Remediation using Brachiaria Mutica (FORSSK.) STAPF

Abstract

Phytoremediation is an environment friendly and cost effective method for remediation of heavy metals from contaminated soils by using plants. Chelate assisted metal uptake by plant has only been discovered in the sector of phytoremediation. It is a potential technology for accumulation of heavy metal by plants after application of chelating agents to soil which enhances the level of metal uptake in phytoremediation processes. Chelating agents are commonly used to form complexes with different metal contaminants within the natural environment. The novelty of this work is to reduce the pollution load by ecofriendly method. The research gap adresses in this study is the reduction of nickel pollution by using chelating agent. In this study two chelating agents namely EDTA (Ethylene diamine tetra acetic acid) and DTPA (Diethylene triamine penta acetic acid) were used along with the nickel treated soil and also with soil without containing nickel to determine the efficiency of decontamination by a wild plant "Para grass" [Brachiaria mutica (Forssk.) Stapf] towards phytoremediation of nickel. In this experiment it was observed that the plant which were subjected to grow in EDTA with nickel treated soil accumulated more nickel than the other two sets which were subjected to grow in nickel treated soil with DTPA and also without chelating agent.