Enrichment, Source Apportionment and Health Risk Assessment of Soil Potentially Harmful Elements Associated with Different Land Use in Coastal Tidelands Reclamation Area, Eastern China

Abstract

Coastal tidelands are important ecological habitat resources and valuable resources for agricultural land reclamation. Enrichment of potentially harmful elements (PHEs) in soil caused by anthropogenic activity is an important factor implicated in the ecological deterioration of soil in China. A total of 54 soil sample sites were selected from a 30-year reclaimed tideland and an adjoining coastal wetland. Descriptive and multivariate statistical analyses were performed to describe the enrichment, source, health risk status of eight PHEs (As, Co, Cr, Cu, Mn, Ni, Pb, and Zn) after long-term reclamation. Results indicated that after 30 years of reclamation, most soil PHEs are slightly enriched, whereas no serious threat of environmental pollution was observed. In the reclamation area, the enrichment of PHEs in the aquaculture land, industrial land, and cropland was relatively high compared with other land use types, such as tideland and halophyte land. The source analysis divided the PHEs into five categories: (1) Cu; (2) Co and Mn; (3) Cr; (4) As and Pb; (5) Zn and Ni. Cu was completely derived from natural parent materials and other elements were governed by both weathering of parent rock and human activities, including agricultural activities, industrial production, and transportation emissions. The health risk assessment showed that the soil PHEs potentially had no non-carcinogenic risk to the public, but there was an acceptable probability to have cancer due to Cr and As. Meanwhile, children are more susceptible to harm from the PHEs in soil than adults. According to the economic and social development situation in the coastal region, it is necessary to pay attention to the environmental threats of PHEs enrichment.

Exposure Factors in Health Risk Assessment of Heavy Metal(loid)s in Soil and Sediment

“…The most typical inhalation term is "inh" [8,46,51,68], but other terms such as "inhale" [70,74,80] and "inhalation" [22,49] are additionally used. "Der" [52,68,69], "skin" [49], and "dermal contact" [73,91] are terms used for skin contact, whereas "derm" [8,35,98,114,115] and "dermal" [76,104,111,116] are the most widespread. The average daily dose is calculated according to Equations ( 1)-( 3):…”

“…The majority of authors took a number smaller than 365, taking into account that people are not necessarily in contact with the land every day. However, some authors analyzed more cases, such as residential, industrial, recreational, agricultural, and forest land, and used values of 262.5 [69], 345 [52,118], 312 [53], 180 [87,98], and 365 [113,115]; most classified soils as residential (housing) and, hence, used values of 350.…”

“…All authors used the same value of 1.36 × 10 9 , which was the same for children and adults [39,52,58,67] [13,48,123], with a value of 1.32 × 10 9 . The parameter's name varies, with emission factor [111,115], dust emission factor [114], particulate emission factor [98,112], and inhalation factor for emission particulates [45] in use, but particulate emission factor is the most prevalent [70,73,87,113]. This factor has the least variation in units and used values.…”

Research on heavy metal level and co-occurrence network in typical ecological fragile area

“…The reason for this phenomenon may be: the soil texture in the study area is mainly gritted, and the soil texture is heavier. Therefore, the leaching materials including heavy metals are poor, and the mass fraction kept in the soil is relatively high; at the same time, the adsorption performance of the soil colloid with heavier particle size is relatively relative, and the more heavy metal elements on it [25]. Grit is positively correlated with Cu and negatively correlated with Cd, Ni, Cr, and the correlation coefficients are 0.244, -0.282, -0.41, and − 0.469, respectively, showing that the texture of gravel is more likely to accumulate nickel and chromium.…”

A new hazard assessment workflow to assess soil contamination from large and artisanal scale gold mining

“…Various contamination indices have been developed and used to characterise pollution or contamination of different environments; some examples are the Enrichment factors (EF, Chester & Stoner, 1973) and the Geoaccumulation Index (Müller, 1969). In many cases, these indices are relatively simple to implement as they are using reference values from background/ baseline values (e.g., Enrichment factor) which are readily available from the literature (Atapour, 2015;Zuzolo et al, 2017;Liu et al, 2018;e.g., Seifi et al, 2019;Xu, Sun and Wang, 2019;Chen et al, 2020). Nevertheless, issues have been raised with regards to their robustness in situations where changes in concentration units occur, leading to alterations in the results of the analysis (i.e., not scale-invariant, see Aitchison & Egozcue, 2005;Pawlowsky-Glahn et al, 2015 for more details).…”