Electronic waste, or e-waste, is among the fastest-growing environmental pollutants around the globe. Used phones, computers, and batteries end up in landfills where they seep out poisonous heavy metals like lead, cadmium, and zinc into the soil. These heavy metals are non-biodegradable and have the ability to get into both human populations and the environment—contaminating groundwater, poisoning plants, and even entering the food supply.
But what if nature could be utilized to restore order to this disarray?
This work looked at a special group of bacteria that are present in e-waste-contaminated soil. These bacteria have one particular talent: they can survive in polluted environments and remove toxic metals from the surrounding soil.
Scientists so far discovered a number of strains of bacteria that can carry out two helpful processes:
- Bioleaching – in which bacteria naturally convert solid metals into a soluble form that can be washed from the soil.
- Biosorption – in which metals bind to the surface of the bacteria like magnets, making it simple to remove.
Among all the microbes that were investigated, one strain—Microbacterium sp. 1S1—stood out. It was resistant to heavy-metal-saturated conditions and removed up to 75% of zinc from the soil in laboratory tests.
This process is known as bioremediation, and it’s important because:
- It’s cheap (no expensive equipment needed);
- It’s clean (uses living microbes instead of poisonous chemicals);
- It’s safe and scalable for contaminated sites all over the world.
Although most research was so far conducted in a laboratory setting, the findings suggest that with further optimization, bacteria like Microbacterium sp. could be utilized at large-scale e-waste processing plants to clean up the soil more sustainably than current methods.
Full text: Husnain Ahmad Khan, Shahid Sher, Dilara Abbas Bukhari, Abdul Rehman, Bioremediation of heavy metals from electronic waste dumping sites with bacteria, Current Research in Biotechnology, 100309. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.crbiot.2025.100309