Phytoremediation is a developed field, with many plants being screened for efficiency.
Does anyone actually do this in real life (as opposed to writing academic papers about it)?
So I think there is little to gain from not doing it and at least some good gained from doing it.
I notice the lack of numbers :-)
If you do have a heavy metals soil pollution problem, do you think bioaccumulating weeds will significantly help? If you do not, why should you bother? Talking about lawns, no one eats that grass, so you can make the argument that it's better to have contaminants tied up in the soil rather then extracted.
I don't know if people do this in real life (or I would have chosen a different thread), but one obstacle why they would not is lack of infrastructure. Once you get a truckload of toxic waste, what to do with it?.. Also, I hope to have some numbers for one species (actually, for a fraction of its ecoforms) in a limited range of pollutants in a specific geographic area, under specific land use conditions, collaborating with chemists who will hopefully find the problem interesting enough, AND I live in Ukraine. I won't have time for it until after defending ...
Thus spake Eliezer:
It seems that many here might have outlandish ideas for ways of improving our lives. For instance, a recent post advocated installing really bright lights as a way to boost alertness and productivity. We should not adopt such hacks into our dogma until we're pretty sure they work; however, one way of knowing whether a crazy idea works is to try implementing it, and you may have more ideas than you're planning to implement.
So: please post all such lifehack ideas! Even if you haven't tried them, even if they seem unlikely to work. Post them separately, unless some other way would be more appropriate. If you've tried some idea and it hasn't worked, it would be useful to post that too.