Abstract: Losses of surfactant due to sorption need to be
considered when selecting surfactant doses for soil bioremediation.
The degree of surfactant sorption onto soil depends primarily on the
organic carbon fraction of soil and the chemical nature of the
surfactant. The use of biosurfactants in the control of the
bioavailability of toxicants in soils is an attractive option because of
their biodegradability. In this work biosurfactants were produced
from a cheap raw material, trimming vine shoots, employing
Lactobacillus pentosus. When biosurfactants from L. pentosus was
added to sediments the surface tensión of the water containing the
sediments rapidly increase, the same behaviour was observed with
the chemical surfactant Tween 20; whereas sodyum dodecyl sulphate
(SDS) kept the surface tension of the water around 36 mN/m. It
means, that the behaviour of biosurfactants from L. pentosus is more
similar to non-ionic surfactatns than to anionic surfactants.