Phytoremediation of soils contaminated with used lubricating oils using sunflower

Abstract

Lubricating oil is one of the most important derivatives from petrol industry, However its life
cycle finished with the generation of the used oil, ham,ful to the environment and must be
suitable disposed, A Brazilian law authorized the use of 30% of re-refined lubricating oil with
the new oil, This market leads to the establishment of several new industries which use small
and medium trucks to collect used oil at gas stations where consumers change the lubricant
oil, On the last years an intense flux of these trucks can be observed at the main road of
Brazil, which connects Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, the two biggest cities of our country,
This scenario can lead to possible accidents and oil spills, This paper relates the use of
sunflower to remediate soils collect at the margin of this important road, It was tested soils
contaminated with 2, 4, and 6%, The soils were extracted with Soxhlet extraction using
cyclohexane and analyzed by gas chromatography with flame ionization detection, The first
three months of the experiments indicated a phytoremediation of 86, 82, and 65% for the soils
contaminated with 2, 4, and 6%, respectively,