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Remediation of Heavy Metal-Contaminated Soils by Phosphate Fertilizers

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Twenty Years of Research and Development on Soil Pollution and Remediation in China

Abstract

In China many crops are still planted in contaminated soils because of insufficiently high-quality agricultural soil resources, so some measures both providing adequate nutrients and reducing the transport of contaminants in these soils should be taken, among which the application of phosphate materials is the most prominent. A detailed summary of more than 10 years of our research on this field was presented here. Firstly, application of phosphate fertilizers to contaminated soils promoted crop growth and reduced toxic metal uptake by plant, where hydroxyapatite (HA) and/or Ca(H2PO4)2 had the best effect, with 99.1% increase of rape biomass and 58.4% decrease of Pb concentration in rape shoot. Secondly, in view of potentially environmental risk such as second pollution of heavy metals and eutrophication to a water body, the type and rate of phosphate source and also application method should be studied comprehensively, and soluble and insoluble phosphates should be combined together and preferred to slightly contaminated soils. Thirdly, there were three main processes involved in the interaction between P and metal: (1) phosphate-induced adsorption of metal ions, (2) the formation of metal-phosphate precipitates or minerals, and (3) phosphate surface adsorption or complexation of metals. Pb immobilization proceeded dominantly through a pyromorphite precipitation, whereas phosphate-induced adsorption and coprecipitation were responsible for Cd immobilization. It is important to focus on the long-term stability of metal immobilization in phosphate- amended soils, but very little research has been done and little is known. Other issues should be also focused on in the future, such as the transformation and transport of heavy metals in soil-plant systems after phosphate addition, environmental and ecological risks from long-term overuse of phosphate to metal-contaminated soils, etc.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the Ministry of Science and Technology of China (National Basic Research and Development Program- 2002CB410809) and Natural Science Foundation of China (41271254).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Engineering Laboratory for Improving Quality of Arable Land, Institute of Agricultural Resources and Regional Planning, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Beijing, China

    Minggang Xu, Shiwei Zhou & Shibao Chen

  2. South Subtropical Crops Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Tropical Agricultural Sciences, Zhanjiang, China

    Minggang Xu

  3. School of Agriculture, Ludong University, Yantai, China

    Shiwei Zhou

Authors
  1. Minggang Xu
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  2. Shiwei Zhou
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  3. Shibao Chen
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Minggang Xu .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Soil Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing, China

    Yongming Luo

  2. Yantai Institute of Coastal Zone Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Yantai, China

    Chen Tu

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Xu, M., Zhou, S., Chen, S. (2018). Remediation of Heavy Metal-Contaminated Soils by Phosphate Fertilizers. In: Luo, Y., Tu, C. (eds) Twenty Years of Research and Development on Soil Pollution and Remediation in China. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6029-8_33

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