Bioextraction incorporates a range of technologies that not only use plants to remove, reduce, degrade, or immobilize environmental pollutants from soil and water, for restoration of contaminated sites to a relatively clean, non-toxic envi­ronment but also use microbes to extract metals from the low grade ores. This relatively new and growing technology uses natural processes to break down, stabilize, or accumulate pollutants and for extraction of metals [3]. It basically incorporates two phenomena:

• Phytoextraction

• Biomining

Phytoextraction is the removal of pollutants by the roots of plants, followed by translocation to aboveground plant tissues, which are subsequently harvested. Biomining is the extraction of metals by the help of naturally growing thermal sensitive microbes.