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Treating toxins

A cheap, effective technique to remove toxic polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) from contaminated soil has been developed in the US by scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee. The technique is considered an important advance since, unlike the biological remediation (disintegration) process developed by research workers in the early 1990s, it does not require mixing PCB-contaminated soil with river sediment. Sediment is the only element in the environment in which anaerobic bacteria thrive. These bacteria can degrade the persistent chlorine compounds, PCBs. The new technique uses two types of bacteria

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