Phytoremediation Potential of Bioenergy Plants

The globally escalating population necessitates production of more goods and services to fulfil the expanding demands of human beings which resulted in urbanization and industrialization. Uncontrolled industrialization caused two major problems – energy crisis and accelerated environmental pollution throughout the world.

Presently, there are technologies which have been proposed or shown to tackle both the problems. Researchers continue to seek more cost effective and environmentally beneficial pathways for problem solving.

Plant kingdom comprises of species which have the potential to resolve the couple problem of pollution and energy.

Plants are considered as a potential feedstock for development of renewable energy through biofuels. Another important aspect of plants is their capacity to sequester carbon dioxide and absorb, degrade, and stabilize environmental pollutants such as heavy metals, poly-aromatic hydrocarbons, poly-aromatic biphenyls, radioactive materials, and other chemicals.

Thus, plants may be used to provide renewable energy generation and pollution mitigation.

An approach that could amalgamate the two aspects can be achieved through phytoremediation (using plants to clean up polluted soil and water), and subsequent generation of energy from the phyto-remediator plants. This would be a major advance in achieving sustainability that focuses on optimizing ‘people’ (social issues), ‘planet’ (environmental issues), and ‘profit’ (financial issues).