Soil management

The presence of lead kills most bacteria making it impossible to bioremediate soil contaminated with lead. This bacterium is able t o survive and bioconcentrate lead on or in its membrane which probably allows it to survive as well as to remove lead from contaminated soils The use of a bacteria for on-site remediation of soils by accessing the soil to a bioreactor with encapsulated bacterium that can be separated later to the soils or using a membrane to immobilize the bacterium. This is a soil organism which will survive in the soil at pHs of soils (around 4).

Summary: Inorganic nitrogen is a vital nutrient for plants. Soil nitrate provides as much as 90 percent of the nitrogen taken up by most plants and leads to a dramatic change in gene expression which is critical to direct the productivity and survival of the plant. Consequently nitrate is commonly provided by way of fertilizer to improve crop yield. However many crop plants are inefficient in their ability to utilize the nitrogen. For example corn and wheat typically only utilize 50 percent of the nitrogen applied to the soil and paddy rice may recoup as little as 30 percent.

There are currently few satisfactory choices for the rectification of toxic or radioactive metal contamination of soils. On a small scale contaminated areas may be restored by physical removal of surface layers followed by appropriate disposition (usually remote burial) of the material and re-landscaping to restore the site. On a large scale this approach is infeasible and the alternative is to abandon the land for a prolonged period or permanently restricting access or uses.

Cheaper production of zeolites for environmental applications such as soil and water remediation is possible using this process that starts from the waste material fly ash. The process produces up to eight times the zeolites and produces them more cheaply than do other zeolite processes. It also uses seawater and operates at low temperatures while other processes required higher temperatures. Zeolites capture and retain heavy metals by encapsulating them in the zeolitic framework via an ion-exchange mechanism.