PHYTOREMEDIATION PRECEDENTS
national precedents
National or Local precedents using phytoremediation are difficult to find. In the past, toxic soils were simply scraped into a pile and capped with an inert material, and strategies focused on cleaning polluted water rather than removing toxins from the ground. However, a number of phytoremediation experiments in Australia have been conducted on industrial waste, particularly in open cut coal mines. A selection of these is presented below, together with examples of post industrial urban landscapes in Sydney where the primaty focus has been on the management of water quality and quantity.
international precedents
The lack of built phytoremediation projects within Australia meant there was a need to look internationally. Phytoremediation has been utilized throughout Europe for a number of decades, subsequently transforming post industrial sites into thriving ecologies within a handful of years. A number of sites presented have similar post industrial contaminants to White Bay Powerstation. The techniques utilized are experimental, but have proven results to demonstrate there worth to both the landscape and the practice/science of phytoremediating.
