Phytoremediation of Pharmaceutical Wastes: A Safer Approach for Sustainable Environment
Oluwafunmilola Dorcas Ogundipe
ABSTRACT
The persistence release of pharmaceutical wastes in soil and water bodies is now a growing concern and this leads to reduction in soil fertility, food chain contamination, reduction in crop production, antibiotic resistance and aquatic biodiversity loss. Encapsulation, incineration and acid leaching are few of the conventional methods pharma-industries utilize in treatment of pharmaceuticals wastes. These methods are inefficient and releases harmful emission to the environment which affect the ecosytem. Therefore, there is need for exploration of sustainable approaches such as phytoremediation, whereby green plants are employed to clean up pollutants. These green plants can accumulate and degrade pollutants through Cytochrome-450 mediated metabolism to less toxic compounds. Also, there is a low level of awareness available to discuss the potential of this approach in cleaning up of pharmaceutical wastes. Several studies have focused on removal of pharmaceutical wastes using varieties of plant species; thus, this review covers a summary of these plants and their phytoremediation capabilities on commonly found pharmaceuticals in the environment. In this review, literature findings indicated that green plant species can absorb and metabolise pharmaceutical residues from soil and waterbodies, with uptake depending on both plant species and pharmaceutical wastes type. This supports their potential application in environmentally sustainable waste treatment strategies. In conlusion, such green plants can be cultivated in lands suspected to have been contaminated with pharmaceuticals and pharma- industries can as well scale up this approach in treatment of wastes inorder to promote a sustainable ecosystem.
