Phytomining: An Innovative Technique for Sustainable Recovery of Valuable Metals/Metalloids from Agro-industrial and Mining Wastes

Primary supplies of several economically essential metals/metalloids are diminishing, resulting in high supply risks and rising costs of these resources. A way to recover these metals/metalloids is to recycle and use secondary sources made by humans like agro-industrial green/mining wastes or contaminated sites. Such metals/metalloids may be recovered from these secondary sources via phytomining technology. Phytomining is one of the potentially creative and cheap sustainable techniques for choosy recovery of important metal/metalloids from various inferior sources. Phytomining intends to recover these metals from wastes incineration slags by cultivating hyperaccumulating plants on these substrates. It is a type of phytoextraction in which the buildup of valuable metals/metalloids in the hyperaccumulator plants is equivalent to those of traditional metal ores. Thus, the technique has sufficient worth to support cultivation of hyperaccumulator plants in order to yield a marketable bio-ore. Additionally, the implementation of agronomic methods for metal extraction through farming that enhance economic return is a necessary step for development and success of phytomining technique. Such kind of agro-farming for metal is also known as agromining, a subset of phytomining. In the recent past, significant progress has made in understanding how phytomining, an eco-friendly technique based on plants, could be used in the agro-based or mining sector to build a positive connection between the industrial sector and the societal communities. This chapter is focused on phytomining and its applications in wastes produced from agro/mining industries as well as contaminant sites that contain metals/metalloids with a marketable value.