Metals in mine wastes: environmental pollution and soil remediation approaches – a review

Abstract

Millions of hectares in Africa, Europe, Asia, Australia, and America are contaminated of mine wastes. This contamination has caused a serious danger to humans, animals, plants, and microorganisms near mine sites. Such contamination may cause kidney dysfunction, reproductive deficiencies, mental retardation, or even death. These sites need to be remediated urgently to minimize their effect and for safety of the ecosystem and the environment health. Different approaches were used including chemical, physical, and biological approaches. Due to the limitations of the physicochemical techniques, the major interest was been devoted to the biological techniques, especially the phytoremediation. These techniques are considered as the future solution for cleaning the contaminated sites with mine wastes. The present review discusses the metals in mine wastes and their effects of humans, animals, plants, and microorganisms as well as the used remediation techniques to treat the contaminated soils.

Keywords:

• Mine wastes
• phytoremedition
• biological remediation
• physicochemical approaches
• metals
• soil pollution

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge Professor S. Bouda, Department of Biology, Beni Mellal, Sultane Moulay Slimane University, Morocco for his interesting and valuable suggestions during the course of studies. The authors would like to express their appreciation and gratitude to Professor A. Belhaj, Department of Physics, Beni Mellal, Sultane Moulay Slimane University, Morocco and Professor A. Koubali, Department of English, Beni Mellal, Sultane Moulay Slimane University, Morocco for their careful revision of the language of this manuscript. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.