article · Frontiers in Environmental Science
Industrial activities, urban waste, and mining have contaminated soils and waterways with heavy metals and organic pollutants. This degradation harms soil composition, reduces organic matter, destroys beneficial microbes, and threatens agriculture and food security, while also causing severe human health problems. Environmental remediation is essential to counteract these hazards. Remediation by Enhanced Natural Attenuation, known as RENA, is an eco-friendly biological technique. It involves turning the soil to enhance aeration, moisture, and nutrient distribution, which in turn encourages microbial growth and accelerates the natural degradation of contaminants. This approach aims to restore soil functionality and safety. The review outlines the mechanisms behind RENA, the functional microbes involved, the practical challenges facing its implementation, and recommendations to advance its adoption for sustainable land management.
Soil contamination from heavy metals and industrial waste damages food production ecosystems and causes chronic human illnesses, including respiratory, metabolic, and oncological disorders. Using biological methods like RENA offers an eco-friendly pathway to detoxify damaged land. Understanding how natural soil turning and microbial action break down pollutants helps communities and land managers restore fertile ground for safe agricultural use without causing further environmental harm.
RENA could serve environmental remediation contractors, agricultural land managers, and industrial site operators seeking low-impact land rehabilitation methods. Because this work is a broad review of mechanisms, microbial agents, and operational challenges rather than a report of novel field trials, the technology represents established knowledge. Real-world commercial deployment requires navigating the operational and regulatory hurdles outlined in the review.
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The uncontrolled use of chemicals, urban wastes, nuclear resources, mining, petrochemicals and disposal of sewage sludge only a few anthropogenic activities that have contributed to the rapid industrialization and severe heavy metal contamination of soils and waterways. Both inorganic and organic pollutants, such as heavy metals, pesticides, petroleum hydrocarbons, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, can impact the composition and functionality of soils. Soils and plants are affected by pollution, thus, pose a dire threat to food security. This directly renders the soil unuseful for agricultural purposes, destroys the beneficial microbes in the soil, reduces the soil organic matter content, causes the imbalance of soil nutrients, affects plant growth and the interaction between the plants and microbes, subsequently affecting the soil and crop productivity. In addition, environmental pollutants affect human health, leading to different illnesses such as headaches, allergies, coughs, depression, chest pain, nausea, diabetes, liver problems, cancers, eye problems, and so on. Remediation (physical, chemical or biological) is therefore necessary to reduce the impacts of these pollutants in the environment. Bioremediations involve using natural products from plants, microbes, and so on, to detoxify the environment and make it useful or productive again. A key type of remediation is the Remediation by Enhanced Natural Attenuation (RENA) which involves the turning of soil to promote microbial proliferation, aeration, nutrient availability, moisture and consequently, the degradation of pollutants. This review discusses the technology of RENA, the associated microbes, the mechanism of its action, challenges associated with its usage and recommendations to advance the use of RENA for a sustainable environment.
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DOI: 10.3389/fenvs.2023.1182586
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