Water scarcity and contamination are amongst the most pressing global challenges, with profound implications for agriculture, public health, and environmental sustainability. The reuse of treated wastewater in agriculture has emerged as a promising solution to mitigate water scarcity, ensuring a sustainable supply of water for irrigation while reducing the demand on freshwater resources. However, wastewater often contains pollutants, including heavy metals, which can pose significant risks to soil health, crop safety, and human health. Heavy metals such as copper, cadmium, or lead are persistent and non-biodegradable, accumulating in the environment and potentially causing toxicity in plants and soil. Conventional wastewater treatment methods often struggle to remove heavy metals effectively, leaving a critical gap in the safe reuse of the treated wastewater for agricultural purposes. Plasma treatment of wastewater shows promising results in dealing with decomposition of organic compounds or disinfection of water from numerous pathogens. However, plasma and PAW application in heavy metal remediation is relatively unexplored. This proposal aims to assess plasma's efficacy in reducing heavy metal toxicity in wastewater. This will be achieved by implementing plant experiments focused on monitoring the impact of plasma treated wastewater and control water on plant growth, fresh and dry mass measurement, chlorophyll content and concentrations of heavy metals and nutrient elements. The distribution and concentration of elements in plant tissue will be studied by cutting-edge method Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy. Furthermore, the effect of plasma treated water on physical-chemical properties of soil and elemental availability will be investigated.

Keywords
non-thermal plasma, agriculture, wastewater remediation, circular economy, water reuse

8X25016

English

Čechová Ludmila, Ing., Ph.D. - principal person responsible
Kaiser Jozef, prof. Ing., Ph.D. - fellow researcher
Krejsová Lenka, Ing. - fellow researcher
Pořízka Pavel, doc. Ing., Ph.D. - fellow researcher
Vozár Tomáš, Ing. - fellow researcher

Advanced instrumentation and methods for material characterization
- responsible department (15.1.2025 - not assigned)
Central European Institute of Technology BUT
- responsible department (9.1.2025 - 15.1.2025)
Institute of Physical and Applied Chemistry
- co-beneficiary (1.7.2025 - 30.6.2027)
Advanced instrumentation and methods for material characterization
- beneficiary (1.7.2025 - 30.6.2027)

Responsibility: Čechová Ludmila, Ing., Ph.D.