Simi Suganthan (PhD Student)
University of South Australia

Project Title
Seaweed as an Enhancer for Bioremediation of Persistent Organic Pollutants in Long term Contaminated Soils

Biography
Simi completed her Bachelor degree in Microbiology under the University of Madras and Masters degree in Environmental Science at the Anna University, both in India. She worked for six months as a Research Assistant for a Research Project titled “Feasibility for the Treatment of Produced Water”at Anna University, Chennai, India. Simi also worked under the designation Leader (Operations) in an Environmental Consultancy; Hubert Enviro Care Systems Pty Ltd. She is currently doing her PhD at the Centre for Environmental Risk Assessment and Remediation (CERAR), under CRC-CARE at the University of South Australia. Simi is working on “Bio-remediation of Persistant Organic Pollutants (POP) in contaminated soils”, under the supervision of Dr. Ravi Naidu, Dr. Meghraj Mallavarapu and Dr. Nanthi Bolan.

Start Date
March 2005

Project Details
Persistent Organic Pollutants are synthetic chemicals which were introduced into the environment for various purposes during early 1950’s. Rachel Carson (1962) sounded the alarms about the toxic and persistent nature of these chemicals and their adverse health effects on ecosystem (Adeola et al. 2005).

Environmental and health concerns about emissions of POPs have encouraged the development of technologies for the destruction and decontamination of POPs. The present prevailing technologies are expensive and the economic bioremediation technologies are found to be time consuming and yet to address the issues related to the treatment of aged POPs in soils.

A recently published study on bioremediation of POPs shows encouraging results using sea weed as an ameliorant. This study, however, is based on one soil only and was conducted using a small volume of soil. The mechanism of the chemical breakdown is also not apparent from this study. Given the large number of POPs contaminated soils and the recognition that in Australia, we have stored in bulk houses over 100 thousand tones of such contaminated soils, this study investigates the the capability of seaweed towards degradation of aged POPs contaminated soils along with other biological sources. The study will investigate the biochemical transformation of POPs at molecular level with a view to optimizing the bioremediation of POPs. It focuses on increasing the bioavailability of POPs that are bound strongly to the soil and remain non available to the microbes for degradation under various environmental conditions.