Analia Iriel, Gabriela Lagorio M and Alicia Fernández Cirelli
Phytoremediation is an attractive and ecofriendly solution for remediation of polluted soils and water. Despite the large number of papers published on this topic, discussion of the results in literature is valuable but insufficient in order to take concrete and practical decisions in remediation processes by using living plants. In this sense, there is a remarkable difference between approaches used for living and nonliving biomass. In this brief commentary we suggest a series of recommendations for planning experiments and for the processing of results when using plants in pollutants´ removal. The objective is obtaining useful and clear parameters such as the optimum contact time for maximum uptake of the pollutant, the removal rate and the maximum sorption capacity, to decide which species and conditions should be chosen for the uptake process.