Advancing Phytoremediation from Lab Research to Field Applications

Escalation in agriculture, industries, and urbanization has brought the release of perilous organic pollutants, heavy metals, radionuclides, and agrochemicals into the environment. These pollutants pose a threat to the environment and are one of the greatest challenges faced by the modern society today. However, many physiochemical and biological approaches or their combinations are available that are very expensive, energy-, and labor-intensive, or destructive to the environment. A plant-based technology, phytoremediation, is comparatively simple, cost-effective, efficient, eco-friendly, sustainable, low-labor-intensive, and promising strategy applicable to large areas. Plants remediate contaminants via phytoextraction, phytodegradation, phytostabilization, rhizofiltration, and phytovolatilization. Moreover, natural or synthetic amendments, microorganisms, and genetic modifications have improved phytoremediation performance. Despite efforts, it has largely been confined to the laboratory scale and its applicability to the field scale is still lagging. In addition, reliable monitoring methods and metrics for onsite evaluation must also be established for field scale. This chapter focuses on the challenges of the field-scale applicability of phytoremediation and addresses these issues to maximize its field-scale applicability.