Cyanophos is commonly used in Egypt to control various agricultural and horticultural pests. It is
a strong
contaminant in the crop culturing environments because it is highly persistent and accumulates in
the soil. This contaminant can be removed by phytoremediation, which is the use of plants
to clean-up pollutants. Here we tested several several strategies to improve the effectiveness of
this technology, which involved various techniques to solubilize contaminants. The
phytoremediation efficiency of Plantago major L. was improved more by liquid silicon dioxide (SiO2)
than by other solubility-enhancing agents, resulting in the removal of significant amounts of
cyanophos from contaminated soil. Liquid SiO2 increased the capacity of P. major L. to remove
cyanophos from soil by 45.9% to 74.05%. In P. major L. with liquid SiO2, leaves extracted more
cyanophos (32.99 mg/g) than roots (13.33 mg/g) over 3 days. The use of solubilization agents such
as surfactants, hydroxypropyl-ß-cyclodextrin (HPßCD), natural humic acid acid (HA), and Tween 80
resulted in the removal of 60 convergents of cyanophos from polluted soil. Although a batch
equilibrium technique showed that use of HPßCD resulted in the efficient removal of cyanophos from
soil, a greater amount of cyanophos was removed by P. major L. with SiO2. Moreover, a large amount
of cyanophos was removed from soil by rice bran. This study indicates that SiO2 can improve
the effi-
ciency of phytoremediation of cyanophos.