Grass could turn toxic waste into energy

Grass could turn toxic waste into energy

www.abc.net.au

A team of Australian and Chinese scientists claims to have pioneered a method to decontaminate polluted land and provide an ecologically renewable energy resource in the process.

(visit the link for the full news article)

Professor Naidu says the grass is good at decontaminating soils for two reasons.

"The first is that when you have hydrocarbon contamination, the grass is able to pump oxygen into the soil and through that process certain types of hydrocarbons will biodegrade," he said.

"The other role is with metal contaminants - the grass is able to take up metals and accumulate them in the upper parts of the grass."

The grass has been tested on several large sites in Guangdong province which had been heavily contaminated by mining activity.

Sound like good news

www.abc.net.au
(visit the link for the full news article)

Do you suppose this would help the Hungarians ? After that toxic reservoir collapsed, it spread heavy metal laden filth ridden mud through six towns and who knows how many square miles of land. Apparantly the volume of contaminant was only slightly smaller than the total volume of oil spilt in the Deep Water horizon disaster.
The disaster in Hungary however was made worse by the fact that arsenic , radium , and some other particularly nasty elements were present in the fluid mix which was spilled over the land. I wonder if this grass was planted there, how long it would be before those elements were removed from the soil ?

reply to post by TrueBrit


Yeah i guess that after they clean it all up there will be alot of ground that will have been contaminated, it may be quite helpful to them