Abstract: Phytoremediation is a group of technologies that use plants to
reduce, remove, degrade, or immobilize environmental toxins, primarily those of
anthropogenic origin, with the aim of restoring area sites to a condition
useable for private or public applications. The poor physical structures,
acidity, lack of nutrients, presence of toxic heavy metals are the common
characteristics of mine tailings. Bare tailings are prone to erosion, resulting
in further environmental degradation as the very young soils develop on
unstable materials with low cohesion. Appropriate vegetative cover of such bare
tailings can overcome the adverse physical and chemical properties of them.
Collecting naturally growing plant species on such tailings and the evaluation
of plant metal concentrations can be used to get information about specific
plant behaviour in this environment. Thus considering the diversity of plant
responses in contaminated sites having different metal and toxicity levels, at
various levels, it is important to study the composition of plant community
that was established on metal enriched tailings that would serve as a basic
approach for phytoremediation. In this paper, general aspects of
phytoremediation processes, plant response to soil heavy metals, the pathway of
metal in plants, different extraction methods used for prediction of plant
availability of metals in soil and outcome of various studies regarding trace
metal contents and their accumulation in plant species growing on metal
enriched spoils/tailings are reviewed.
Keywords: Phytoremediation, heavy metals, metal accumulation in plants
