Abiotic and Biological Technologies for the Remediation of Phenylurea Herbicides in Soils

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Phenylurea herbicides (PUHs) are reported to be amongst the most extensively used herbicides in agriculture for pre- and post-emergence control of weeds and mosses in a wide variety of crops. Most of the PUHs have been forbidden in some European countries due to their presence in water and soil, which leads to serious environmental and public health problems in a wide variety of organisms, including humans. This review gives an overview of abiotic and biological technologies used for the remediation of soils contaminated by PUHs, including their limitations and advantages. PUHs present from low to moderate adsorption to soils, the organic matter content being the main influencing factor. For this reason, the majority of the remediation studies in soils are based on the most hydrophobic PUHs, diuron and linuron. The degradation of PUHs in the environment is primarily considered to be due to microbial transformation, and most of the techniques developed for soils are based on bioremediation, which can be enhanced through biostimulation and bioaugmentation processes, and also by the addition of solubilizing agents to increase PUHs bioavailability. But also, abiotic processes have to be considered, remarkable are those that are based on advanced oxidation processes (AOPs), widely used in the decontamination of PUHs in water, but which can be considered as emerging technologies for soils tested only at lab scale. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

This work was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities under the research project CTM2017-82472-C2-1-R (AEI/FEDER, UE). A. Lara-Moreno acknowledges the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports for her FPU fellowship (FPU15/03740).

Peer reviewed