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Using Plants to Clean Up Contaminants

© Kenneth Friedman

Industries have been dumping, piling, burying, spilling, spewing, emitting, injecting and what-have-you since industries were first invented. For many, it was cheaper to just "put it somewhere" than to make use of the materials. Plenty of industries and small businesses still "put it somewhere" if they can get away with it, which is bad for the environment and people because of toxic pollution, wasted resources, exploitation and lack of sustainability. At least one entrepreneur even wants to ship wastes to the moon. We should ship him.

A lot of waste or misuse of waste, it turns out, is toxic or hazardous — bad for human health and the environment. Love Canal, New York and Times Beach, Missouri, are the two most infamous cases of "stuff" coming back to haunt us. Love Canal was about chemicals seeping into basements and playgrounds. Times Beach was about dioxin-tainted oil sprayed to keep dust down on dirt roads and roadsides. People from the Environmental Protection Agency, Congress and elsewhere call a lot of the worst deposits of "stuff" superfund sites after the well-intentioned but underfunded Congressional Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act (SARA) meant to help clean up the sites.

Cleaning up "stuff" isn't easy. In Times Beach the EPA bought the town and moved everybody out because of the dioxin-tainted soil. Out near Salt Lake City, "stuff" was distributed all over a neighborhood through air emissions from an old mine smelter — copper, I think. Instead of moving the town, the government dug up and hauled away from about seven to nine inches of top soil from everyone's yard. Of course, the tainted soil has to be put somewhere, probably in what is called "an approved landfill." This means it is put in an "authorized" pit so everyone knows where it is and can stay away from it, and so leaching can be monitored. Leaching occurs when rainwater and snow melt, enter a landfill and carry away chemicals.

Buying towns and hauling away soil (for burial elsewhere) aren't always the best solutions, however. One solution that seems to be good so far is the use of plants to remove pollutants. One experiment that has been conducted using plants to remove pollutants takes the form of constructing artificial wetlands. Scientists have found that as certain wastewaters flow through such artificial wetlands certain plants "take up" various chemicals from the water so that the water that enters a stream, river or ocean is clean. If we had left more of our natural wetlands, we'd be better off, apparently. Good for wildlife and good for us.