Quantifying ecological and human health risks of heavy metals from different sources in farmland soils within a typical
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Quantifying ecological and human health risks of heavy metals from different sources in farmland soils within a typical mining and smelting industrial area Xiaofan Xie . Yuexian Liu . Hui Qiu . Xiaosong Yang
Received: 8 September 2019 / Accepted: 21 September 2020 Ó Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract The quality of food crops and human health is threatened by heavy metals (HMs) accumulated in farmland soils for a long time. In this study, we selected 148 soil samples randomly from farmlands in a region featuring abandoned lead–zinc (Pb–Zn) mining activities with the aim to quantify the pollution risk and identify potential sources of heavy metals, based on a case in the southwestern of China. The median contents of metals, such as Pb, Zn, Cd, As, Cu and Cr, are above the background values for Chinese soils and prescribed pollution threshold guide values (GB15618-2018), except Hg and Ni. The farmland soils in sites surrounding areas with previous Pb–Zn mining and smelting activities were classified as seriously polluted. Pollution sources were evaluated using GIS-based geostatistical methods, multivariate statistical analyses and positive matrix factorization (PMF) modeling. Four sources were quantitatively apportioned, which were industrial sources such as mining and smelting (53.1%), agricultural practices (11.6%), natural source (21.6%) and other industrial sources such as electroplating (13.7%). The potential
risks of contamination associated with the heavy metals were evaluated using several indices including the Nemerow, geoaccumulation (Igeo) and ecological risk (RI) indices. Based on the Igeo index, As and Pb were the most severe pollutants among all of those measured. With the combination of the potential ecological risk index (RI) and human health risk (HHR) assessment models, the ecological risk and HHR from different sources were analyzed quantitatively. Industrial activities such as mining and smelting were the greatest contributors to ecological risk, non-carcinogenic risk and carcinogenic risk, accounting for about 86.9%,73.9% and 81.9%, respectively. Additionally, the health risks of children were more serious relative to those of adults from the perspective of non-carcinogenic and carcinogenic risks. Keywords Farmland soils Heavy metals Sourcing Risks quantification
Introduction Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10653-020-00731-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. X. Xie Y. Liu (&) H. Qiu X. Yang College of Resources and Environment, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China e-mail: [email protected]
Mining and smelting activities have contaminated the surrounding farmland soils (Liu et al. 2019a, b; Wang et al. 2020a; Yang et al. 2018), with an annual increasing rate of 46,700 ha of wasteland (Wang et al. 2019). These activities have led to a decline of the availability of farmlands and the prod
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