now, most of them are low biomass producers and exotic species
(Surriya et al., 2015). Therefore, the potential use of this robust tropical
crop in phytoextraction technology is advocated especially for developing
countries with scarce funds available for environmental restoration
(Wuana and Okieimen, 2010). As stated by Meers et al. (2010),
phytoremediation is only feasible when the produced biomass can
be valorised, and maize crop meets this requirement. Even growing
maize under Belgian soils contaminated with high Cd, Zn and Pb
concentrations, metal concentrations in grains were very low and
below European animal feed criteria.Moreover, maize Zn annual removal
in these soils promoted a reduction of about 0.4–0.7 mg kg−1 in the top
soil layer.