Soil Amendments for Heavy Metal Immobilization Using Different Crops

Industrial development has put enormous negative impacts on the natural environment. Metal refining units using pyrometallurgical processes have emitted excessive load of heavy metals. Soil is the prime target of such contaminants and polluted in over the vast area. Soil pollution poses a great threat to public globally. Heave metals (HMs) are persistent in nature and do not undergo chemical or biological breakdown, but remain in the environment for long periods since their emission. Immobilization is an in-situ remediation technique that uses cost effective soil amendments to reduce Pb and Cd availability in the contaminated soils. This chapter has focused on heavy metal pollution in the soil through considering: sources, types of soil contaminants, global overview of soil pollution, environmental health risks and immobilization options using various soil amendments. This chapter describes commonly used and emerging cost effective amendments for heavy metal immobilization. There is a dire need to develop procedures to determine immobilization efficacy that could be used to assess the in situ short and long-term environmental stability of metal immobilization.