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In this article we will look at 3 kinds of plants that are brilliant at helping people survive a water crisis by providing water pollution solutions, as all plants are adept at cleaning the air, soil, and water around them these particular ones really stand out for cleaning water. Cattails, Sunflowers and Duckweed, making use of these plants as a water pollution solution is a brilliant plan, after all Mother Nature is the expert in sprucing up her own back yard.

The first time I came across this idea is when I was searching for advice on aquaponics and discovered duckweed, it grows very fast and you can use it in your aquaponics system to create food for the fish. But its other properties are why it's included in this list.

Why use Duckweed as a water pollution solution.

Lemna minor L. also called duckweed, is very adaptable.

It grows extremely fast, in optimum conditions, it is able to double its weight in approximately one day making it perfect for food production and as a biomass for fuel, grown in the right conditions it has higher starch content than corn and when you distill the duckweed it makes perfectly good ethanol.

It will take away excess nitrogen, phosphorous and other contaminants from the water. Bio mining is another way to use the plant. The method involves unearthing tainted subsoil and infusing it with water and then growing the duckweed on the surface where it then condenses the phosphate, down to the smallest particles, from the water and then itself is harvested and the phosphate is reclaimed. The remaining sediment is put to use for other things.

There is a vast amount of analysis of the uses for duckweed, it is a good process to take away harmful materials from the water and then it's biomass can also be used for fertilizer, animal feed and distilling into ethanol and the list goes on. All around Duckweed is a fabulous, little plant that can aid us to survive a water crisis by providing us a water pollution solution.

How to use Cattails as a solution to our water pollution problem.

To procure a water pollution solution to survive a water crisis we are looking at Cattails (Typha spp) next. With the help of cattails one person has accomplished just that, his name is Jeremiah Jackson, Ph.D., P.E., he created an easily made version of an organic water filtering system that could be manmade with material available locally. He used sand for the base and cattails that were planted 1 foot apart in about 12 sq. ft., there was a reduction in the amount of arsenic from recorded levels usually found in places such as rural India to levels below what the WHO believes to be o.k. for human consumption. At an estimated cost of $0.21 for 1000 gal treated compared to the typical cost of removing arsenic which is known to be anywhere from, $53 to $300 per 1000 gal.

Cattails have long been used in the remediation of water, Cattails are an aggressive species and many consider it invasive but nevertheless they are an outstanding water cleaner and if they are to be taken away they should be harvested mechanically and checked for contaminants.

Why use Sunflowers as a solution to our water pollution problem.

Sunflowers (Helianthus sp) are very good at taking up contaminants and accumulating them in their roots. The Sunflower is considered a natural hyper-accumulator, which is a plant that can remove large amounts of contaminants without harm to itself. Sunflowers are able to remove chromium, copper, manganese, lead and zinc from the dirt and keep it from flowing into the surrounding water table.

In the Feb 29 1996 Wall Street Journal an article documenting how a NJ company, Phytotech produced a strain of sunflowers that could absorb even more harmful material then common sunflowers. These special sunflowers were grown on a piece of styrofoam in a pond nearby to Chernobyl and after 12 days they took measurements of the amounts of cesium and strontium concentrations in the roots and found them to be extremely high compared with what was still in the water. Although, it seems that the sunflowers did not work out nearly so well in Fukishima, perhaps more study is needed to determine the differences in each environment, nevertheless, there is a font of information out there to say emphatically that plants filter water.

There is a great deal of information online about water pollution solutions and how we can survive a water crisis, far more than what can be written about here. Certainly with wise use of our natural resources we should be able to clean up the environment in a minimilistically intrusive way and perhaps learn something about balancing our wants with the limited resources of our planet.