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Abstract
A plant‐based natural surfactant extracted from fruit pericarps of Sapindus mukorossi was tested to remediate contaminated soils. Natural surfactants are shown to increase the solubility of hydrophobic organic compounds (HOCs) significantly and recover them from soil. Bioenhancement of typical soil microorganisms in natural surfactant solutions under aerobic and anaerobic conditions was investigated in our earlier studies. These surfactant solutions can readily serve as both carbon and energy sources and degrade considerably. In this study, a chlorinated organic, hexachlorobenzene (HCB) is used as a model contaminant to study the effect of contaminants on the bioenhancement. HCB at a concentration of 1 mg/l which is about 20 times that of HCB aqueous solubility was used for both aerobic and anaerobic cultures. Aerobic and anaerobic biodegradation experiments were conducted in 250 ml Erlenmeyer flasks and 125 ml serum bottles respectively. HCB at the concentration tested did not affect the growth of microorganisms significantly under both oxygen rich and anoxic conditions. HCB neither underwent any biotransformation nor adsorb to the biomass. The presence of basal salt media enhanced the biological growth under both the conditions.