Salt pollution in freshwater is a growing global concern.
Salt pollution in freshwater is a growing global concern.
Excessive salt harms plants, degrades soil, and compromises water quality. In urban areas, road salts used for de-icing during winter often wash into stormwater systems, posing health concerns and challenges for infrastructure.
Specifically, salts can impact the processes like filtration and contaminate retention basins that are used to manage and treat urban stormwater runoff. Megan Rippy, assistant professor in civil and environmental engineering, is on a mission to understand how salt affects plants in stormwater detention basins and assess whether certain plants can mitigate salt pollution through a process called phytoremediation.
“Plants play an important role in green infrastructure performance, but only 1 percent of plants, known as halophytes, can handle highly saline environments,” said Rippy. “This makes it important to characterize the threat salts pose to green infrastructure as well as the potential of salt tolerant species to mitigate that threat.”
Read More: Virginia Tech
Megan Rippy collects soil samples at a stormwater detention basin along Interstate 95 in Northern Virginia. (Photo Credit: Stanley Grant)
