Using Medicinal Plants for Purification of Urban Surface Wastewater

At present, there is quite a significant contamination of water bodies with various pollutants, and this process has not ceased to this day. Among the most serious ones are heavy metals, which enter water bodies with urban surface wastewater, including from impervious surfaces. It is possible to prevent this from happening by using modern bioengineering facilities. One of the components in these facilities are bioaccumulator plants. Today, the search for such plants is still relevant, but they must meet a number of requirements: they must be pollution-tolerant, adapted to a region’s climate, aesthetically attractive (what is important for urban territories), and they must be cheap. Namely that is why wild mint (Mentha arvensis L.) medicinal plant drew our attention, as it meets all the above-mentioned requirements. In this article, we study the plant's structure and composition. The interaction within the plant-sorbate system has been examined in laboratory conditions using the limited volume method. During the study, the time of contact of the plant with the sorbate has been varied from 1 to 72 h, while the ambient temperature has been 20 °С. The goal of this research is to study the bioaccumulating capacity of wild mint when used for purification of urban surface wastewater from heavy metals (on the example of Al, Cr, Cu, Fe, Mn and Zn). The obtained research results show that the concentration of pollutants has been reduced by 40–100%. The authors recommend to use wild mint in combination with other bioaccumulator plants to achieve synergistic effect.