**1. Introduction**

There are heavy metal contaminations in the soil erosion from agricultural lands, urban wastes, and the products from rural, industrial, and mining industries that attracts worldwide concern, especially in developing countries [1, 2].

Nowadays, in Vietnam, lots of trade villages (about thousand villages) are developing by many kinds of professions, and they have problems with wastewater and solid waste. Among waste matter, there are many types of metal contaminations.

The vetiver grass was first developed for soil and water conservation in farmlands. Morphological, physiological, and ecological characteristics of vetiver have a key role in the environmental protection. The vetiver root system can be reached up to 3–4 m in the first year. Vetiver can be tolerant to extreme climatic variation flood, prolonged drought, submergence, and extreme temperature. Vetiver can live in very harsh environments where surface temperature from 13°C exceeds 55°C, soil pH, from 3.0 to 10.5, high soil salinity, sodicity, acidity [2–4].

It seems that vetiver as other Panicoideae plant subfamily follows the same conjugation detoxification pathway, and vetiver is close to sorghum [5]. The transformation known to be positive for the environment, due to major metabolism of atrazine in vetiver grown in hydroponics was conjugation, mainly in leaves [6].

The vetiver grass was selected for wastewater treatment purpose from metal production trade village Dong Xam, Thai Binh, because of many reasons as at firstly, it can tolerate in wide range of pollution conditions [7–9], second, low-cost alternative mean to vegetate the heavy metal-contaminated area [3]. Vetiver is fast growth, and has strong root system and a long-lived perennial and can survive up to 50 years or more [10]; and vetiver can be produced 99 tons/ha/year (average dry matter yield) [11].

Many previous studies [2, 3, 6, 12–18] had reported the uptake capacity of some heavy metals by vetiver, but metals such as Al, Cu, and Sn have not been investigated completely, especially the pollution likes in "metal production trade village Dong Xam, Thai Binh" with numberless of heavy metal contaminations.

### **2. Materials and methods**

### **2.1 Vetiver growth conditions**

The soil materials were collected from five points in the study area, then sieved through a 2-mm mesh, and well mixed to obtain composite homogeneous samples. Seedling of vetiver was wrapped with the composite soils and irrigated with different chemical pollution regimes (**Figure 1a**).

The contents of Al, Cu, Pb, Sn, and Zn elements at soil in two pots (TB10 and TB6) are the same for vetiver cultivation, respectively, at 2.5, 55.6, 0.15, 7.7, and 24.4 mg (take out from wastewater of metal production trade village Dong Xam (**Table 1**)) and one pot (control) in the clean tap water. No fertilizer was applied during the entire growing period. Temperature in the laboratory growth chamber was 25 2°C.

Vetiver plants were harvested after 36 days of growth in laboratory chamber by contaminated water TB10, TB6, and control water. The plant's height was 0.7 m (**Figure 1b**). First, the plants were rinsed three times with tap water and then two times with deionized water to remove all soil and other materials; afterward, it was dried in shade at room temperature for 5 days, and then at 80°C for 2 days in oven to constant weight. The plants were partitioned into five parts: three parts of shoots (S1—10 cm of shoot is from the meristematic region, S2—next 10 cm of shoot, S3—remaining part (about 20–40 cm) in the chop of shoot, meristematic region (M), and root (R)). The samples were sieved through a 2-mm mesh and well mixed (**Figure 2**).

*Perspective Chapter: Uptake Capacity of Metals (Al, Cu, Pb, Sn, Zn) in Contaminated Water… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.108931*

**Figure 1.** *(a) Vetiver land, and (b) it was grown in laboratory chamber by contaminated water for 36 days.*


### **Table 1.**

*Analytical results of contaminated solutions from two wastewaters (metal production trade village Dong Xam) before treatment by vetiver (mean SD).*

**Figure 2.** *(a) Vetiver samples TB6 and (b) TB10 were sieved through a 2-mm mesh and mixed well.*
