Risk assessment of potentially toxic elements in soils and vegetables around coal-fired thermal power plant: a case stud
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Risk assessment of potentially toxic elements in soils and vegetables around coal-fired thermal power plant: a case study of Dhanbad, India Deep Raj
&
Subodh Kumar Maiti
Received: 5 June 2020 / Accepted: 24 September 2020 # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract The present study was intended to determine the potentially toxic elements (PTEs) concentration in fly ash (FA), soil, plant, and vegetable to assess the impacts of pollution on the nearby areas of coal-fired thermal power plant (TPP). The PTEs concentrations (mg/kg) in FA were Cr (48–74) > Pb (41–65) > Cd (7.4–9.7) > As (3.19–4.43) > Hg (0.518–0.598). The contamination factor (Cf) for Cd was highest in agricultural soil (Cf = 22) followed by roadside soil (Cf = 20), and forest soil (Cf = 15), which showed that the soil was strongly polluted due to the presence of Cd. The ecological risk index (ERI) in the topsoil of roadside area was also very high (1130), due to the high value of ecological risk factor of Cd (898) and Hg (213). The health risk associated with the intake of soil containing PTEs were also estimated by calculating hazard index (HI), and the values showed that the risk posed to children was minimum (HI < 1). But in case of roadside area, the HI was very close to one (0.975) indicating that the prolong exposure may pose severe health risk. The Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10661-020-08643-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. D. Raj : S. K. Maiti (*) Department of Environmental Science & Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology (Indian School of Mines), 826 004, Dhanbad, India e-mail: [email protected] e-mail: [email protected]
D. Raj e-mail: [email protected]
bioaccumulation coefficient of all PTEs for Albizia lebbeck and Madhuca longifolia were < 1, indicating less PTEs accumulation in the plant species. The hazard quotient of all PTEs (except of Hg) through vegetable consumption (Allium cepa and Raphanus sativus) was > 1, which signifies that the long-time consumption of contaminated vegetables may cause severe risk to the people. Keywords Contamination . Fly ash . Ecological risk . Bioaccumulation . Hazard quotient
Introduction The coal burning thermal power plants (TPPs) are the largest contributors of potentially toxic elements (PTEs) to the environment and, therefore the TPPs are considered the major source of environmental pollution. TPPs release solid wastes in the form of fine fly ash (FA) (85– 90%) and coarse bottom ash (5–15%) (Verma et al. 2015). The FA has relatively small surface area and, therefore has more tendencies to absorb PTEs during coal burning (Güleç et al. 2001). The FA containing PTEs move to the nearby areas of TPP through atmospheric emissions (atmospheric fall out), and gets deposited on the soil surface (Dragović et al. 2013). The continuous atmospheric fall out of FA may induce the changes in the physico-chemical properties and quality of soil in the long run (Mandal and Sengupta 2006).
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