Phytoremediation of lead using corn in contaminated agricultural land—An in situ study and benefit assessment

•Bright Jean No. 7 corn is highly tolerant of lead.•Corn grown in Pb-contaminated soils yielded 93.37 ton/ha/yr dry matter weight.•Corn for phytoattenuation with 7.2 kg/ha/yr of lead removed.•The lead content of kernel is lower than the limit of EU animal fodder.•25 ton/ha/yr of kernel is valuable as animal feed and generated revenues.

Phytoremediation is an environmentally friendly and economically feasible remediation technology for mitigating soil contamination in agricultural lands. However, phytoremediation can be a slow process, and for highly contaminated soils this approach would require hundreds to thousands of years to meet soil environmental quality standards. Such a long period of phytoremediation is relatively unfeasible without economic revenue from crop production. This study involves growth of corn in plots of lead-contaminated agricultural land with Pb concentrations of about 6000 mg/kg. Our results showed that Bright Jean No. 7 corn was highly tolerant to lead, as evidenced by minimal effects on its growth and biomass production. Annually, each hectare of corn could produce up to 93.4 tons of dry matter and removed up to 7.2 kg of lead. The corn biomass grown on such contaminated fields could be used as a bioenergy fuel, and each hectare of corn biomass could produce 1545 GJ of thermal energy every year, which is equivalent to the heat from combustion of 57 tons of hard coal. The lead content in the corn kernel was less than the EU standard limit for animal consumption. Each hectare could produce approximately 25 tons of corn grains for animal feed per year, and the remaining parts of the plant could be used as the bioenergy fuel to generate heat energy equivalent to 40 tons of hard coal.