The purpose of this two-year project is to screen and evaluate the fast-growing and high-pollutant-uptake trees for petrochemical industrial parks in Taiwan. The first-year study is focusing on industrial parks with naphtha-cracking factories. There are four major tasks in this first-year project: (1) To review all the literatures related with fast-growing and high-pollutant-uptake trees in petrochemical industrial parks; (2) To investigate and identify all tree species growing well in at least three petrochemical industrial parks; (3) To measure the pollutant uptake rates of major tree species belonging to fast-growing and high-pollutant-uptake group with instruments; (4) Comprehensive evaluation and grading all the fast-growing and high-pollutant-uptake trees species tested in this study for future application in petrochemical industrial parks in Taiwan. The measurements of pollutant (including O3, C7H8, and HF) uptake rates by tree species were conducted in bag branch enclosure chamber. The tolerance of these tree species to salt spray were also tested for evaluating their performance in inland or coastal areas. After a series of field investigation around three petrochemical industrial parks in Taiwan, a total of 23 tree species were preliminarily selected and listed for detail measurements of pollutant uptake rates and salt spray tolerance. We have compared the O3 uptake rates of them and found that among them chinese pistachios, silvery Messerschmidia, juniper Tamarisk, Indian almond, and marabutan can do the better job. To C7H8, the higher uptake rates were found on poongaoil pongamia, date palm, iron wood, chinese pistachios, and red cedar. For HF uptake measurement, madagascar almond, marabutan, silvery messerschmidia, juniper tamarisk and Taiwan zelkova showed the higher uptake rates. Results also showed that Taiwan nato tree, Norfolk island pine, date palm, juniper Tamarisk, iron wood, seashore ardisia, silvery Messerschmidia, poongaoil pongamia, and marabutan were salt tolerant species.

petrochemical industrial park, fast-growing tree, pollutant uptake