Do plants absorb toxins from the soil?

Question

Consider a plant like Aloe Vera that grows up in a toxic environment where the concentration of pesticides, and materials like lead, mercury, cadmium, arsenic etc is very high(e.g. Marshland dumping yard ). Would that mean that the extract from these plants would contain all these toxic elements.

Answer 1

Some plants are much more enthusiastic about taking up and storing (called "fixing" as in affixing or binding, not "fixing" as in repairing) soil toxins than others. This is why some are most often used in contaminated site remediation efforts. Because they are not generally plant nutrients, how and where these plants store the contaminants varies greatly, but GENERALLY they are stored in the tissues we think of as the storage tissues. As for aloe specifically, I'm not sure, but something like eating a potato from a nuclear fall-out site (for an extreme example) would be particularly scary.