Compost and vermicompost of olive cake to bioremediate triazines-contaminated soil

The use of organic amendments to bioremediate potential organic pollutants of soil and water has become an increasingly relevant issue in the last years. This strategy has been applied to four triazine herbicides in a typical calcareous agricultural soil of the Mediterranean area. The soil was amended with olive cake, compost and vermicompost of olive cake at rates four times higher than the agronomic dose in order to stimulate biodegradation of simazine, terbuthylazine, cyanazine and prometryn, added in a mixture to the soils. Degradation studies were carried out in sterile and microbially active soil to evaluate the effect of the chemical and biological degradation of triazines. The residual herbicide concentrations at the end of the degradation assay showed no significant differences between non amended and amended soil. However, the addition of compost and vermicompost enhanced the biological degradation rate of triazines during the first week of incubation, with half-lives ranging form 5 to 18 days for the amended soils, whilst negligible degradation occurred in non-amended soil during this period. In contrast, olive cake did not significantly modify the degradation of triazines in spite that the addition of this amendment to soil resulted in the highest dehidrogenase activity values. In all the substrates, degradation of cyanazine and prometryn was faster (between 1.5 and two times higher) than those of terbuthylazine and simazine, without significant relationship with sorption parameters. The first order kinetic equation satisfactorily explained the experimental data for all triazines. A biphasic model, such as that proposed by Hoerl, was better to predict the very rapid triazines decay during the first week of incubation in soil amended with compost and vermicompost.