Flower power key to turning metal poisons into nanoproducts

The project, called CL4W (Cleaning Land for Wealth, pronounced ‘claw’) could help develop cheaper and lower-energy ways of remediating contaminated land as well as producing valuable commercial products, said project leader Kerry Kirwan.

The team, which includes researchers from the Universities of Edinburgh, Newcastle, Cranfield and Birmingham, came together as part of an EPSRC ‘sandpit’ to pool resources on biorefining and synthetic biology.

‘We’ve known for many years that plants can suck up metals from the soil; it’s why bananas are rich in potassium and cabbage has iron,’ Kirwan told The Engineer.

‘And bioremediation is well established — it was used to clean up some land around Chernobyl using hemp and flax, for example. But we had a good look at the literature, and it seems that nobody has tried to recover the metals from the plants. They generally just burn them, or if the metal is really toxic or radioactive, lock them away safely.’