Current and emerging trends in bioaugmentation of organic contaminated soils: A review

Organic contaminated soils constitute an important environmental problem, whereas field applicability of existing physical-chemical methods has encountered numerous obstacles, such as high chemical cost, large en-ergy consumption, secondary pollution, and soil degradation. Bioaugmentation is an environmentally friendly and potentially economic technology that efficiently removes toxic pollutants from organic contaminated soils by microorganisms or their enzymes and bioremediation additives. This review attempted to explore the recent advances in bioaugmentation of organic contaminated soils and provided a comprehensive summary of various bioaugmentation methods, including bacterial, fungus, enzymes and bioremediation additives. The practical application of bioaugmentation is frequently limited by soil environmental conditions, microbial relationships, enzyme durability and remediation cycles. To tackle these problems, the future of bioaugmentation can be processed from sustainability of broad-spectrum bioremediation carriers, microbial/enzyme agents targeting combined contaminants, desorption of environmentally friendly additives and small molecular biological stim-ulants. Findings of this research are expected to provide new references for bioaugmentation methods that are practically feasible and economically potential.

Automated summary

Organic contaminated soils are a significant environmental issue and the existing physical-chemical methods face various obstacles. Bioaugmentation, an environmentally friendly and potentially economic technology, has been explored as an alternative. This review provides a comprehensive summary of bioaugmentation methods for organic contaminated soils, highlighting practical limitations and proposing future directions.