Soil-water pollution is of serious concern worldwide. There is a public outcry against the continually rising problems of pollution to ensure the safest and healthiest subsurface environment for living beings. A variety of organic pollutants causes serious soil-water pollution, toxicity and, therefore, the removal of a wide range of organic pollutants from contaminated matrix through the biological process rather than physico-chemical methods is an urgent need to protect the environment and public health. Being an ecofriendly technology, bioremediation can solve the problems of soil-water pollution due to hydrocarbons as it is a low-cost and self-driven process that utilises microorganisms and plants or their enzymes to degrade and detoxify pollutants and thus, promote sustainable development. This paper describes the updates on the bioremediation and phytoremediation techniques which have been recently developed and demonstrated at the plot-scale. Further, this paper provides details of wetland-based treatment of BTEX contaminated soils and water. The knowledge acquired in our study contributes extensively towards understanding the impact of dynamic subsurface conditions on engineered bioremediation techniques.
Keywords: BTEX; NAPL; bioremediation; groundwater; pollution; soils.