Ebook: Phytoremediation for Green Energy

Human demand for energy has grown multi-folds in recent years. This is the result of rapidly increasing human population, which, in turn, has resulted in increased organic (petroleum) and inorganic pollution on the biosphere. Due to this, we are now facing a number of challenges to sustain life on earth. For example, the increased organic and inorganic pollution in our environment is leading to loss of biodiversity, degradation of environment and thus ultimately causing food insecurity. In this situation, it is imperative to keep updated ourselves with advances on the effects of pollutants, tolerance mechanisms and the potential of different plants and microbes in removing these pollutants from the environment. For this purpose, we invited a number of scientists worldwide to review the current scenario of the problems, current development, and future prospects of the challenges and their solutions in an International Conference on ‘‘Plants and Environmental Pollution’’ held in KAYSERI, TURKEY from 6-11 July 2009. The output of this conference has been summarized in the form of this book.

The demand for energy is rapidly increasing to fulfill the need of the rapidly increasing human population. The production of GREEN ENERGY is a dream of human kind. Despite the discovery of renewable sources of energy such as hydroelectric, wind and solar energy, use of thermal power plants powered by oil, coal and gas is vital to run the economy of the majority of developing countries. This, of course, puts pressure on the petroleum industry to extract and refine substantial quantities of crude oil to fulfill this demand. Resultantly, incidents of oil pollution have become very common due to oil spills during extraction, refining and transportation processes. Unfortunately, organic compounds do not degrade easily by natural degradation processes and stay in the environment for a long time. Therefore, they continue posing environmental and health risks to living organisms. Plants and microbes are of vital importance for our planet. They can be used as a potential source for phytoremediation of inorganic as well as organic pollutants so as to clean the environment. We need to explore opportunities to find potential candidates to fortify our efforts of bio-remediation.

This book is an effort to explore the possibilities of using plants and microbes to clean the organic and inorganic pollutants present in our environment thereby fulfilling our objective of green energy production.