In response to a growing need to address environmental contamination,
many remediation technologies have been developed to treat contaminated
soil (Riser-Roberts, 1998), mainly mechanically or physio-chemically based
remediation methods. The most commonly used techniques are listed in
Table 1. However, these technologies are usually expensive and soil disturbing,
sometimes rendering the land useless as a medium for further activities
such as plant growth. Consequently, a biologly-based emerging technology
is gaining the attention of both soil remediation scientists and the general
public—phytoremediation. Phytoremediation makes use of the naturally occurring
processes by which plants and their microbial rhizosphere organisms
sequester, degrade or immobilize pollutants for cleaning not only soils but
also water matrices contaminated with heavy metals or organic pollutants
(Pilon-Smits, 2005).