Contamination and Pollution in Land and Water in China - Frightening??

And people wonder why the Chinese are buying overseas land for agriculture!!  A recent report, noted in the official Xinhua news agency is sobering reading, with major contamination of land and water resources.

In Australia we should both consider ourselves very lucky..........but as sure a hell, we need to work hard to keep our soil and water clean both now and for the future.

That issue is part of the angst being expressed by many over the use of frackking in gas development along the eastern states, with concerns over both land and water damage.  It is also a concern along the Hunter Valley over mine expansion [ mostly coal] in that that will ruin the agriculture and horticulture there, not to mention the very valuable thoroughbred industry.

We have neither the people nor so far, the unregulated industrial development rampant in China. Luck or good management?  Whatever, let it continue!

The data from China is appalling, and not improving either it seems.

The soil close to Yangzong Lake, southwest China's Yunnan Province was seriously polluted by arsenic in 2009.

More than half of China's water reserves are moderately or heavily contaminated, the latest annual report released by the country's Ministry of Land and Resources has revealed. The findings confirm previously raised concerns over the condition of China's water and soil, despite large-scale cleanup programs that have cost billions of dollars, Xinhua reported.

The report revealed that 59.6 percent of the country's water was polluted last year, 2013. That's even more than in 2012, when the percentage was 57.4. Just over one tenth of water reserves fell into the high-quality category last year, although the methods used to determine quality were not specified.

These figures are similar to those from a 2010 report which found that the proportion of contaminated water was around 57 percent, suggesting that even though the government has made significant investments in cleanup efforts, the most it has been doing is keeping pollution at the same level. A proper improvement is still not noticeable in the results.

The situation is similar with the condition of China's soil, according to a new national soil survey released by the Ministry of Land and Resources and the Ministry of Environmental Protection. The results indicate that nearly one fifth of China's arable land was polluted, with about three percent of it classified as moderately or seriously polluted. The bulk of the pollution came from heavy metals, the report noted.  This is pollution - it does not discuss erosion damage and related matters - they must surely be very significant as well.

This recent data released from the Communist Party of China has indicated that 19.4 percent, or around 1.05 million square kilometres of China’s agricultural land is contaminated with an array of toxic metals including cadmium, nickel and arsenic. These can be carcinogens and with China a significant supplier of frozen vegetables to Australia, there is some degree of concern over the quality of the products being imported.  Our family will NOT use frozen Chinese vegetables, and has not done so for years.

 Australia's soils are mostly old and inferior, when compared to many countries, with poor nutrient levels and low organic matter and relatively poor structural conditions - so we do need to make the best from our poorer soils.

Phytoremediation with Napier grass

Napier grass for Phytoremediation

Phytoremediation often seems a simple but slow and unobtrusive process. Not visually obtrusive, no flash pumps nor any drill rigs, but a simple plant, just growing and doing its thing to improve soil quality.

Recent research by a group that involves the Australian CRC, CARE – based in Adelaide – has shown that a commonly used tropical pasture grass – Napier grass , Pennisetum purpureum may offer some simple options for phytoremediation of soil in the tropics.

The specific details are detailed in a generic way in the following link on the ABC web site :
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/10/29/3052165.htm?section=justin

although more details are on this link, direct to the CRC CARE:

http://www.crccare.com/view/index.aspx?id=51669
but the potential seems to operate through metal uptake from soils as well as degradation of some hydrocarbon materials.

Napier grass is a fairly common perennial pasture species used in the tropics, particularly in those regions with rain most of the year. Napier grass which is perennial, has a few relatives in the grass genera that are very deep rooted and do grow on poor, dry soils for example – pearl millet, an annual species. It would be interesting to see how these species perform in the tropics.

There are not many plants considered suitable for phytoremediation use in the tropics so another candidate species is very welcome.

Cannot understand why it is being imported into Australia though, unless these characters are very specific to a new cultivar as would have thought the generic plant was readily available in northern Australia. Bana grass [ same species ] is used commonly as a windbreak grass in north Australia, and there is at least one Australian derived cultivar. See the following for more information:
http://www.tropicalforages.info/key/Forages/Media/Html/Pennisetum_purpureum.htm
and there is plenty more online.

Vetiver grass [ Chrysopogon zizanoides] also has a reputation as a species with metal accumulation properties, as well as being a great erosion control species and one that will colonise on tough soil conditions. Plenty of information on the web site www.vetiver.org

Phytoremediate Explosives - Plant Grass - for a Quick Solution

Mounting evidence shows native grasses could destroy explosives pollution
The Kansas City Star

Missouri researchers are investigating whether native grasses can clean up pollution caused by explosives at hundreds of locations across the country.

Besides the obvious reason, TNT is not good for you.

But grass, it turns out, might be dynamite for the problem.

TNT contaminates hundreds of sites in the US and Australia, from military firing ranges to old production dumps to waterways, and poses a threat to the human nervous system and to the liver and kidneys. It’s suspected to cause cancer. It can cause allergic reactions and attack the immune system, and it may lead to birth defects.

Left alone in the soil, TNT breaks down into an even more toxic substance.

If the problem is left in the dirt, maybe that’s where the solution can grow.

Three Missouri researchers have hit on an idea that could potentially scrub away the TNT danger:
Simply plant the right kind of grass.

The notion started with mounting evidence that native grasses could render harmless a common weed killer. That herbicide, atrazine, is the second most common herbicide used in agriculture in the U.S. and has been a stubborn pollutant in the nation’s waterways. Mounting evidence has shown that certain native grasses, and the microbes that thrive around their roots, convert the toxic leftovers from atrazine into harmless carbon dioxide.

Robert Lerch, John Yang and Chung-Ho Lin began talking about how chemically similar atrazine is to the explosives TNT and RDX. “If it worked for atrazine, we thought it might work for these things,” said Lin, a research professor for the University of Missouri Center for Agroforestry.

Should their idea succeed, it would offer a greener, cheaper and possibly quicker way to clean up more than 530 sites across the USA contaminated by the explosives.

Trinitrotoluene, or TNT, and cyclotrimethylene trinitramine, also called RDX, began creeping into U.S. soil and waterways decades ago, before the manufacturers of explosives came under stricter regulation.

The problem isn’t small. Of the 538 locations identified by the US Department of Defense with RDX or TNT contamination, 20 are Superfund sites — classified by the federal government as the country’s most dangerous abandoned toxic waste sites. Congress rejected a Pentagon proposal in 2005 to exempt the military from regulations for pollution from munitions.

“It’s a serious problem, and it’s widespread,” said Andrew Wetzler of the Natural Resources Defense Council. To clear a field tainted by those explosives — typically to haul away the dirt for incineration — can run from $100,000 to $1 million an acre.

The researchers in Columbia have doped soil samples with explosives and planted two species of grass.

In essence, the explosives practically disappear.

It’s unclear whether it’s the grasses — Eastern gamagrass and switchgrass [Panicum virgatum] seem to work best — do the work themselves, whether it’s two forms of bacteria that thrive in soils around grass roots that do the trick, or if something happens in how they work together.

But in a closet-size room basking in fluorescent lights, a solution to explosives pollution looks to be taking root.

The scientists added RDX and TNT to cup-size soil samples and planted the grasses. In just weeks, the toxic chemicals degraded harmlessly into carbon dioxide and water. “It’s a controlled situation to look at how these chemicals break down,” said Yang, the director of the Center of Environmental Sciences at Lincoln University.

The next step, perhaps still a year or two away, is to test the process outdoors.

The researchers are talking with the Army — the initial research has been covered by $110,000 in Defense Department grants — about trying the grasses on already contaminated sites.

Since the grasses are native and grow easily across the Midwest and the Southeast, they pose no threat of kudzu-like exotic species seen as their own environmental threat.

Initial tests show that the amount of RDX in soil is reduced by 50 percent in a matter of weeks, and TNT contamination drops by 95 percent. So, Lerch said, a year or two after planting, a field could be cleaned of the explosives contamination. And the cost might run less than $3,000 per acre.

“If this works, it will be great".

partially sourced ENN news
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Also interesting to note that switchgrass is also a promising third generation cellulosic source for ethanol production and is being researched extensively for that role as well.

Presumably the same process might be operating with a number of other grass species noted as being tolerant to atrazine. This could include a range of common tropical and warm temperate turf species that are tolerant to the herbicide.

Anyone in the Australian military out there that might want to fund a project here in Australia??

Arsenic Bioremediation Cure Might be Near

A recent serendipitious breakthrough by the Australian CRC for Contamination Assessment and Remediation of the Environment might just be the start of a seriously useful method for curing arsenic contamination.

They have isolated a microbe that can use arsenite - a common and the most poisonous form of arsenic and transform it to arsenate, a chemical form that can be fixed in soil into immobile forms.

More details are available here: http://www.crccare.com/view/index.aspx?id=14980

Arsenic presents in the enviroment in sites used for animal dipping, leather tanning, old mine workings, timber treatment and similar areas as well as in many shallow drinking water wells in Asia, particularly in Bangladesh. Old mine workings are often especially arsenic contaminated, and this often poisons down stream water sources, in conjunction with acid mine drainage. Arsenic, as an element of the periodic table can not be made to "go away" in the conventional sense but there are many forms of the element that are highly insoluble, resistant to leaching and could be contained within the existing sites in a relatively non toxic low solubility form, including forms that are relatively resistant even to acid leaching. Getting it into that chemical format has always been tricky.

In warmer regions, use of plants such as vetiver grass have been used to grow on contaminated soils, slowly accumulating arsenic and other heavy metals into the plant roots, and tolerating the poor soil environment, and actually growing moderately well on the site, a place where many other plants could not grow. But a multi faceted approach combining microbial remediation with use of these plants offers long term solutions in many places, as even getting a soil cover was difficult and this cover will ease issues of erosion of further arsenic from the soil into the environment too, with the organic cover from the plants assisting.

This new microbial solution seems to offer a real option, assuming that formulations of the microbes can be produced on a scale required for industrial use. Bioremediation on actual sites is a bit more difficult than a simple lab trial, and adequate microbes will be required to "saturate" the site environment, grow and proliferate and do the business of conversion.

BUT.........it is VERY promising.