Abstract
The worldwide demand for critical and valuable minerals is growing. Traditional mining practices are environmentally damaging, polluting natural resources with toxic and carcinogenic contaminants, reducing biodiversity, and rendering mined land unavailable for future use. This poses a threat to human and ecosystem health and highlights the need for sustainable solutions, such as phytomining. This study evaluates the benefits, challenges, and knowledge gaps within the field of phytomining through a comprehensive narrative review. The narrative review explores phytomining of critical and other minerals, as well as sustainability aspects of the process, highlighting its potential as a plant-based approach to mineral extraction. The novelty of this study lies in conducting a narrative review that uniquely highlights the role of machine learning and artificial intelligence in improving efficiency, addressing challenges, and guiding future commercial applications by, for example, aiding in species selection, yield prediction, and sustainability modeling. Key challenges include a long growth cycle, project duration, species selection, and post-harvest processing. Potential advancements lie in plant and soil treatments, selective breeding, genetic engineering, and machine learning predictions that can make phytomining commercially viable. It is concluded that phytomining emerges as a sustainable, environmentally friendly technique with the potential to supplement global mineral supply.