Jatropha Curcas L. for Phytoremediation of Landfill Soil

Landfills contain various types of wastes which includes heavy metals. Heavy metals can cause serious environmental pollution and become a threat to public health and safety. Migration of leachate will contaminate the soil and also groundwater. Therefore, contaminated soil must be remediated to avoid any unwanted circumstances. A green technology and cost-saving approach known as phytoremediation has been used to treat contaminated soil by extracting heavy metals using plants where the contamination is accumulated in certain parts of the plant. This research will focus on the accumulation of the heavy metals by using Jatropha Curcas L. plant. It will be conducted to investigate the ability of Jatropha Curcas L. plant in accumulating and extracting heavy metals from the landfill soil, to find the optimum composition of soil where the plant can extract the highest amount of particular heavy metals and to study which parts of the plant have the highest accumulation of particular heavy metals. Jatropha Curcas L. plant was planted on six different planting media T0 (100% healthy soil), T1 (80% healthy soil and 20% landfill soil), T2 (60% healthy soil and 40% landfill soil), T3 (40% healthy soil and 60% landfill soil, T4 (20% soil healthy and 80% landfill soil) and T5 (100% landfill soil) for a period of one months. Plant samples were collected prior to planting into the planting media and after harvest the plant while soil samples were collected before and after planting. The Atomic Adsorption Spectrometer (AAS) was used to determine the concentration of heavy metal in different part of the plant (root, stem and leaves) in each planting medium which is expected to be varies. Besides that, the growth development of Jatropha Curcas L. also will be different in its height and number of leaves due to the different toxicity of the soil. The results shows that JatrophaCurcas L. have ability to extract Pb from the landfill soil. The optimum composition of landfill soil and healthy soil is 60% where the plant can growth healthy and can extract heavy metal.