Book Description

The 21st century is well renowned for wide scale industrialization and urbanization. This progress is global, but it has helped country like India in up-scaling its standards in the technological as well as manufacturing sectors. Due to such immense advancement, the by-products such as heavy metals, due to lack of waste recycling, improper waste disposal and effluent discharge, eventually enter the soil, water and air, and pollute the natural resources. Organic pollutants are biodegradable and have minimal effect on the biotic environment, but the non-biodegradable pollutants are recalcitrant in nature and cause maximum harm to the environment. Heavy metals are categorized as the most toxic inorganic pollutants. The natural sources of heavy metals include weathering of rocks, volcanic activities, leaching of metal ions from the parental rocks into the rivers or groundwater etc. The anthropogenic sources include the combustion of heavy metals containing fossil fuels, chemical industries, paint industries, mining of metals, fertilizers, pesticides, run-off from agricultural sites, various treatment plants liberating the toxicants emerging from the incineration plants along with several industrial and manufacturing activities like metal bending, electroplating, refining, blasting, etc. Remediation of contaminated soil is the utmost need in order to prevent further deterioration of soil and different ecosystems relying on it. Therefore, numerous technologies have evolved to clean-up the heavy metal contaminated soil. The physical methods include surface capping and encapsulation, electrical methods are electrokinetics and vitrification, chemical methods include soil flushing and immobilization, and biological methods encompass bioremediation and phytoremediation. Phytoremediation is a technology, which makes use of plants species to remediate the contaminated medium and bring it to the innocuous state while achieving the goal of sustainability. Phytoremediation studies have recently bloomed due to several plant species, which have high heavy metal uptake capacities owing to denser and rich biomass possessing higher metal extraction potentials. Species growing naturally over the contaminated lands have a high tolerance and innate quality of accumulating a high concentration of toxic substances without showing any apparent changes in the physiological characteristics of the plant. Hence, the scope of the current work focuses on screening of selected weedy species, which needs minimal growth requirements, economical, devoid of nutritive values, tolerant to multi-metal contaminated soil, and available throughout the year. Keeping in mind, the present book Phytoremediation of Heavy Metals from Industrial Effluent by Amaranthus viridis L. and Acalypha indica L. covers screening of hyperaccumulator plant species, scrutinizing their phytoremediation potential, cultivation of hyperaccumulator species applying various heavy metals in different concentrations, evaluating the levels of biochemical compounds in the species under heavy metal stress, exposure of selected hyperaccumulator species to different doses of industrial effluent, analysis of various biochemical parameters of species under effluent stress, and on-site cultivation studies for in situ remediation. The authors affirm that the book would indeed be the need of an hour for students, academicians, researchers, scientists, remediation specialists, industry managers, and pollution control board authorities to prevent the further degradation and deterioration of polluted sites using remediator plant species for maintaining sanctity of an environ for resilient sustainability.