Oil Polluted Soils

Petroleum products can be released into the soil environment via spill, leakage, transport, or other incidents which adversely affect agricultural, residential or recreational land use. Since oil pollution is a great environmental threat as it can pollute neighboring soil, surface and ground water, it may damage ecosystems and negatively affect health of plants, animals and human being. Therefore, its a very important issue to control oil pollution in various environments and to remediate oil polluted sites as well. Soil remediation methods can be divided into three parts; biological, physical and chemical which can be done ex situ or in situ depending on the type of method. During last decades, biological methods (e.g. bioremediation and phytoremediation) have been noticed in several researches. The main reason of using these methods refers to their various advantages. Bioremediation is using microorganism to reduce or break down hazardous organic material to harmless compounds, such as CO2 and water. Plants and their interactions with microorganisms (e.g. bacteria, fungi etc) can also help degradation or dissipation of organic pollutants in contaminated environments. Usually, the biological methods are environmental friendly and retain the quality of environments (soil or water) during the remediation process. Besides, these methods are cheaper than physical and chemical techniques used for remediation. Despite the interest in bioremediation, uncertainties remain concerning the effectiveness for specific compounds and environment. The toxicity of pollutants for microorganisms and plants used in biological methods can reduce remediation efficiency. Furthermore, microorganisms and plants need a long period of time to degrade organic pollutants in the environment

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Last date updated on April, 2024