Chapters authored
The Use of Biochar of High Growth Rate Plants to Agriculturally Remediate Heavy Metal Polluted Acidic Mine Wastes
The chapter is meant to expose how a sound methodology can be instrumented to both, remediate acidic metal polluted mine wastes, taking advantage of the neutralizing power and high metal sorption affinity of biochar, and to utilize pyrolyzed material derived from high-rate growth plants (water hyacinth, Eichhornia crassipes Mart, and Eucalyptus, Eucalyptus globulus Labill), which have become of ecological relevance due to their unwanted proliferation over specific terrestrial, lacustrine or riverine environments. In addition, the proposal considers not only neutralizing the mine tailings and abating the toxic levels of specific heavy metals like Pb, Cd, Cu, Zn, etc., to fulfill the international and national standards and norms, but to conveniently combine biochar with widely used soil amendments to pass widely recognized biological tests of growth using heavy metal-sensitive plants. The approach addresses firstly: a) characterizing physiochemically mine tailings and biochar, in terms of their properties (metal speciation and contents, potential acidity and neutralization potential, chemical oxygen demand, heavy metal-biochar sorption-complexing affinities, among others), and secondly; b) creating a” fertile environment” by reconditioning, agriculturally, the heavy metal-polluted acidic mine waste to allow native vegetation, or other reforesting species, to regrow on the reclaimed site, based on the bioassay tests performances.
Part of the book: Recent Perspectives in Pyrolysis Research