Enhancing agents for phytoremediation of soil contaminated by cyanophos

Cyanophos is commonly used in Egypt to control various agricultural and horticultural pests. It is a strong contaminant in the crop culturing environments because it is highly persistent and accumulates in the soil. This contaminant can be removed by phytoremediation, which is the use of plants to clean-up pollutants. Here we tested several several strategies to improve the effectiveness of this technology, which involved various techniques to solubilize contaminants. The phytoremediation efficiency of Plantago major L was improved more by liquid silicon dioxide (SiO2) than by other solubility-enhancing agents, resulting in the removal of significant amounts of cyanophos from contaminated soil. Liquid SiO2 increased the capacity of P. major L. to remove cyanophos from soil by 45.9% to 74.05%. In P. major L with liquid SiO2, leaves extracted more cyanophos (32.99 mu g/g) than roots (1333 mu g/g) over 3 days. The use of solubilization agents such as surfactant, hydroxypropyl-beta-cyclodextrin (HP beta CD), natural humic acid acid (HA), and Tween 80 resulted in the removal of 60 convergents of cyanophos from polluted soil. Although a batch equilibrium technique showed that use of HP beta CD resulted in the efficient removal of cyanophos from soil, a greater amount of cyanophos was removed by P. major L with SiO2. Moreover, a large amount of cyanophos was removed from soil by rice bran. This study indicates that SiO2 can improve the efficiency of phytoremediation of cyanophos. (C) 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.