Environmental Modelling at Nottingham

Phytoremediation of Arable Sludged Soil

Phytoremediation has been widely proposed as a technology with the potential to extract soil metals over a period of time (years, possibly decades). However there are been few field scale attempts to assess its performance in practice.

In this project we undertaking the field testing of a number of phytoremediation systems in the context of agricultural land amended with sewage sludge. This is especially relevant as increasing amounts of sewage sludge are being applied to agricultural land, with the potential to contaminate that land with metals such as Cd. Phytoremediation may therefore have a role to play in the management of such land.

This work is funded by BBSRC under their LINK programme with contributions from Severn-Trent Water plc and Land Research Associates Ltd.

The project is on-going and therefore only a few outputs are currently available.

An overview presentation of the project can be downloaded [click here - pdf 2.4MB]

An outline of some of the techniques proposed has been presented at ICOTBE7 (click here to view)

The project has created a phytoremediation 'decision aid' which models 3 phytoremediation systems [click here]