In term of ground pollution, most of the people believe that it happens due to the increase of unrecycled waste such as plastic bottle. However, a land pollution does not mean about an area or field that is used for landfill, in which this landfill is filled by mountain of plastic bottle. Such an example happens in New York city, which has 56 kilometers wide of landfill, and this area is considered as enormous landfill. Although this perhaps is one of the biggest waste in the world, the percentage of waste which is just around 2.5% only takes 0.03% of the Americans total area, and even more, in the future this land would be able to be reconstructed. So, what is the real source of land pollution?
The real land pollution is a contaminant that has the ability in damaging the land, in which the land recovery takes a longer duration of time, perhaps centuries, or millenniums. Such this condition is found in the mining activities (copper and alumunium) as these mining generate huge piles of powdered rock, called 'tailings', left behind after the metal has been extracted. Unfortunately, these tailings contain highly toxic heavy metals including mercury and cadmium which are very harmful for living things. For your information, the alumunium mining alone have been generating up to 100 million tonnes of tailings annually worldwide.
The other source of land pollution, well you might have not believed it, comes from agriculture. In a crop or industrial plantations, the needs for growing the crops and plants are not merely from sunshine or the water from the rain, but also the needs for fertilised soils and fertilisers for the growth of leaves, stems, and fruits. In the UK itself, it has been stated that 100 kilograms of nitrogen were used as a fertiliser for hectare of arable land and grassland every year in order to make fertilised soil. Given that the crops that are planted on this soil absorb a small amount of the nitrogen, this nitrogenic fertiliser would be carried by the groundwater which leads to water pollution.
The low-tech solutions to land pollution are the three Rs, which are reduce, reuse, recycle, and these are in decreasing order of effectiveness. The other solution is to use microorganisms such as wood fungi to break down the toxins in oil spills and chlorine pesticides. For the heavy metals, the use of certain plants for absorbing these metals are commonly used as the plants themselves use the metals as one of their metabolite.