Municipal sewage sludge compost promotes Mangifera persiciforma tree growth with no risk of heavy metal contamination of soil

Chu, Shuangshuang; Wu, Daoming; Liang, Liyin L.; Zhong, Fengdi; Hu, Yaping; Hu, Xinsheng; Lai, Can; Zeng, Shucai

doi:10.1038/s41598-017-13895-y

Files

Chu etal_2017_Scientific_Reports.pdf

Published version, 1.458Mb

Chu, S., Wu, D., Liang, L. L., Zhong, F., Hu, Y., Hu, X., … Zeng, S. (2017). Municipal sewage sludge compost promotes Mangifera persiciforma tree growth with no risk of heavy metal contamination of soil. Scientific Reports, 7(1), Article number: 13408. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-13895-y

Permanent Research Commons link: https://hdl.handle.net/10289/11494

Abstract

Application of sewage sludge compost (SSC) as a fertilizer on landscaping provides a potential way for the effective disposal of sludge. However, the response of landscape trees to SSC application and the impacts of heavy metals from SSC on soil are poorly understood. We conducted a pot experiment to investigate the effects of SSC addition on Mangifera persiciforma growth and quantified its uptake of heavy metals from SSC by setting five treatments with mass ratios of SSC to lateritic soil as 0%:100% (CK), 15%:85% (S15), 30%:70% (S30), 60%:40% (S60), and 100%:0% (S100). As expected, the fertility and heavy metal concentrations (Cu, Zn, Pb and Cd) in substrate significantly increased with SSC addition. The best performance in terms of plant height, ground diameter, biomass and N, P, K uptake were found i n S30, implying a reasonable amount of SSC could benefit the growth of M. persiciforma. The concentrations of Cu, Pb and Cd in S30 were insignificantly different from CK after harvest, indicating that M. persiciforma reduced the risk of heavy metal contamination of soil arising from SSC application. This study suggests that a reasonable rate of SSC addition can enhance M. persiciforma growth without causing the contamination of landscaping soil by heavy metals.

Date

2017

Type

Journal Article

Rights

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Collections

Science and Engineering Papers [2919]