Recent Advancement in Phytoremediation for Removal of Toxic Compounds

Abstract

The environmental pollution, nowadays, is becoming a serious problem around the globe. Pollution is increasing due to rapid industrialization, expansion of urbanization, rapidly growing human population, mining, and agricultural development. The major categories of pollutants are toxic heavy metals and toxic organic pollutants. The pollutants are found to be hazardous to human health, plants physiology, and the ecosystem. The purpose of this chapter is to address phytoremediation techniques using wild and transformed plants for pollutants removals. Phytoremediation is found to be an eco-friendly and cost-effective approach to remove contaminants from the polluted environment. The commonly used wild plants for the removal of pollutants include Ricinus communis L., Brassica napus, Pteris vittata, Sunflower (Helianthus annuus), Indian mustard (Brassica juncea), Vetiveria zizanioide, Tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum), Willow tree (Salix caprea), and polar tree for both toxic metals and organic pollutants. From the reviewed research works, 86.67% of studies have been done on toxic heavy metals removal and 13.33%of them were performed for removal of organic pollutants. Among the phytoremediation techniques, phytostabilization (30%) and phytoextraction (30%) were the most used methods followed by rhizofiltration (16.66%) to remove pollutants. Moreover, some transformed plants like Tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum) and Arabidopsis thaliana has also been reported for removal of toxic metals and organic pollutants.