Nanotechnological techniques are promising to standard spectroscopy methods as they are more durable, sensitive, targeted, and affordable. Nanotechnology has shown significant new promising approaches for efficient nutrient management to ensure sustainable agriculture. The combined approach of nanotechnology and phytotechnology called “nano-phytoremediation” is used to reduce toxic environments and restore these degraded resources. Nanotechnology also has a significant impact on nutrient uptake in precision agriculture. It's an eco-friendly and cost-effective method for managing and cleaning up soil conditions. Nanoremediation employs nanomaterials to enhance adsorption and sequestration of pollutants and has emerged as a cutting-edge approach with promising in situ and ex situ applications. Applications based on nanotechnology are easy to use, inexpensive, and suggest improved remediation and treatment techniques that could significantly lower soil contamination.
Top1. Introduction
Human-caused environmental degradation poses a challenge to a clean, green, and sustainable environment which results in air, water and soil pollution (Loiseau et al., 2023). Land degradation & soil contamination is a serious global challenge & threat to productivity as it has already affected approximately 6 billion hectares of soil globally. The agriculture land deterioration has been caused majorly by soil erosion, salt damage, declining soil fertility; mining, deforestation, improper fertilizer use, and heavy metal contamination in the soil (Ahmed et al., 2021; Lamichhane et al., 2024).
Soil remediation and land restoration are crucial processes to ensure ecological health and sustainable land usage (Singh et al., 2022). Contaminated soil poses significant risks to agriculture and also has an adverse impact on human health as shown in figure above (Loiseau et al., 2023). Though remediating soil contamination and deterioration is a huge challenge due to the increase of released toxins, with the development of new technologies, efficient pollutant removal has also been made progress recently. Effective methods for quickening the detoxification of a contaminated site include bioremediation, phytoremediation and biostimulation (Kumari et al., 2023). There are several land restoration techniques that can help recover degraded soils and reduce the financial losses that land degradation causes to agriculture and human health worldwide. This global soil resource degradation negatively affects human well-being, food security, and agricultural productivity (Rajput et al., 2021). Therefore, it needs to be addressed immediately. Remediation soil treatment with nanotechnology may offer a long-term way to restore the degraded soil resources. Nanotechnology can also be potentially applied in improving phytoremediation and bioremediation, as well as in the remediation of soil contaminated with heavy metals, pesticides, and their residues, as well as persistent organic pollutants (POPs) (S. Ali et al., 2023; Kumar et al., 2023; Vardumyan et al., 2024).
Nanotechnology based soil and land restoration has shown great potential to achieve the goal of sustainable agriculture (Singh et al., 2023a). Nanotechnology has been utilized in agriculture for crop protection and production with a focus on nanopesticides, nanomaterials, nanofertilizers, nanobiosensors, and nano-enabled remediation techniques for contaminated soils (Bhalla et al., 2022).
Nanotechnological approaches accelerate the clearance of hazardous substances from contaminated soils and are deeply rooted in biological processes (Singh et al., 2023b, c). Numerous approaches, including the use of rhizobacteria, genetic engineering, and chemical additions, have been tried to improve the efficacy of phytoremediation (Azeem et al., 2023). In addition to their beneficial effects on eliminating the contaminants, NMs may have both positive and negative interactions with biotic and abiotic elements (Singh et al., 2024a). For this reason, a great deal of work has been done to assess the synergistic effects of using NMs in conjunction with bioremediation techniques and to clarify the physical, chemical, and biological interactions that may occur in soil or water (Mubarok et al., 2024). Another major obstacle to the in situ applications of Multifunctional nanocomposites is the limited mixing and subsurface transit of nanoparticles. This challenge could be mitigated using engineered approaches for conjunction of nanomaterials with other technologies which could be further developed and tested (Liao et al., 2023).