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Plant Invasion Driven by Heavy Metals and Microplastics: From Mechanisms to Agroecological Management Implications
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This review paper explains how pollution from heavy metals and microplastics in farmland can actually help invasive weeds outcompete food crops, potentially threatening our food supply. This matters because these weeds thrive precisely where soil is contaminated, meaning polluted farmland may become both less productive and more overrun by invasive plants—but researchers suggest these weeds could be turned into biochar (a charcoal-like soil additive) to help clean up the pollution, turning a problem into a possible solution.
Biological invasions and environmental pollution are the two primary threats facing contemporary agricultural ecosystems, and their interaction exacerbates agroecological risks and undermines agricultural sustainability. This study was conducted to systematically elucidate how heavy metals (HMs) and microplastics (MPs) alter the relative advantages of invasive plants in ecosystems, clarify the ecological processes involved, and propose recommendations for the protection of farmland ecosystems. The main conclusions are as follows: (1) Pollution acts as an environmental filter that negatively affects native species, including crops, while creating relative advantages for invasive plants with high tolerance and adaptive physiological mechanisms. (2) Pollution stress enables invasive plants to gain a competitive advantage over native plants through highly plastic resource allocation strategies, prioritization of growth, and more powerful allelopathic effects. (3) Pollution systematically amplifies the advantage of invasive plants by altering the strength of plant–soil feedback (PSF) and driving the restructuring of rhizosphere microbial communities. (4) Invasive plants can be used to produce biochar, which can then be applied in farmland ecosystems for the control of invasive plants and remediation of soil pollution. The framework constructed in this study indicates that heavy metal and microplastic pollution may enhance the invasion of alien plants, posing a serious threat to agroecosystem health and food security. However, using invasive plants as feedstock to produce biochar may offer a solution to the intertwined challenges of plant invasion and environmental pollution.
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Unlocking the microplastics amplification effect: How biochar counters heavy metal risks by driving speciation shifts and reversing soil property degradation
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Microplastics in soil make toxic heavy metals like lead and cadmium more available to plants, meaning crops grown in contaminated soil could absorb more of these harmful substances into food. Adding biochar—a charcoal-like material made from wood chips or straw—to soil helped reverse this problem by improving soil health and locking lead into safer forms, cutting its uptake in lettuce by about a quarter. This matters because it points to an affordable way to reduce heavy metal contamination in food crops grown in polluted soil, though the treatment worked less well against cadmium, so it's not a complete fix.
Effects of combined microplastics and heavy metals pollution on terrestrial plants and rhizosphere environment: A review
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This review summarizes how microplastics and heavy metals interact in soil to affect plant growth and the surrounding ecosystem. When present together, these pollutants cause significantly more harm than either alone, reducing plant weight by up to 87.5% and altering how heavy metals accumulate in crops -- raising concerns about food safety and human exposure through contaminated agricultural products.
Plant-driven strategies for mitigating microplastic pollution in agricultural ecosystems
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Researchers review how microplastics damage agricultural soils and crops — disrupting soil structure, starving plants of nutrients, and triggering oxidative stress — and explore plant- and microbe-based strategies like root-associated bacteria and biochar amendments as promising but underexplored tools for cleaning up plastic-contaminated farmland.
Microplastics and Invasive Alien Plants: A Change in Soil Ecology Deliberately Impacts the Aboveground Productivity of the Crops
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This study examines how microplastic contamination and invasive plant species can jointly harm crop productivity and soil health. Evidence indicates that when both stressors are present in farmland, they significantly disrupt soil carbon cycling, microbial activity, and plant growth, creating a compounding problem that may indirectly affect food safety.
Turning the enemy into an ally: Phytoremediation potential of Solidago canadensis L. for Cd-contaminated soil as influenced by microplastics and biochar
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Scientists tested whether a weedy plant (Canada goldenrod) could help clean up soil contaminated with both cadmium (a toxic heavy metal) and microplastics — two pollutants increasingly found together in farmland. They found that adding biochar (a charcoal-like soil additive made from organic waste) boosted the plant's ability to lock away cadmium while also reducing harmful plant compounds, making this combo a promising, low-cost way to detoxify contaminated soil before it enters the food chain. This matters because cadmium and microplastics can build up in crops and eventually in the people who eat them, so finding pract
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