Heavy metal pollution is a major source of pollution in the environment. Heavy metal pollution in ground and surface water threatens human health and the aquatic ecology. Traditional treatment approaches for removing pollutants from wastewater are typically expensive, time-consuming, harmful to the environment and inefficient. Phytoremediation is a low-cost, environmentally sustainable, emerging technology with a long-term application. The most important part of successful phytoremediation is plant species selection. Organic and inorganic contaminants are removed with great efficiency by aquatic macrophytes. Metal accumulator plants such as water hyacinth, water lettuce and duck weed as well as a few other aquatic plants, are commonly used to treat heavy-metal polluted water. In order to show the extensive applicability of phytoremediation, a comprehensive review about the aquatic macrophytes in phytoremediation has been compiled.
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