THE DAILY MAIL - In an industrial wasteland in Los Angeles, Kreigh Hampel is uprooting California buckwheat with a pitchfork to find out how much lead it has absorbed.
The plant's delicate white and pink flowers belie an astonishing cleaning power, which scientists think could be harnessed to get rid of dangerous pollutants -- and even recycle them.
"That's the miracle of life," enthuses 68-year-old Hampel, who is volunteering on the project.
The experiment is part of a project run by University of California Riverside which has scattered carefully selected plants and fungi on this former industrial site in the hope of getting rid of the heavy metals and petrochemicals that have contaminated the area for decades.
Danielle Stevenson, a PhD student in Environmental Toxicology who is leading the study, says such bioremediation techniques can be much more cost-effective than traditional techniques.
"The conventional method of cleaning up sites is just to dig up all the contaminated soil and to dump it somewhere else," she told AFP.