Availability of Selected (Pollutant) Elements and their Influence on Soil Composition in Urban Area

Abstract

Abstract. Interest in growing fruits and vegetables in private gardens is rising due to nowadays ecological awareness. Avoiding artificial fertilizers and plant protection products does not guarantee the absence of toxic substances, especially heavy metals in the soil and thus in the fruits harvested. Due to either geological bedrock weathering or environmental pollution, garden soils may be rich in certain potentially toxic elements. In the present study ten garden soils from central Croatia have been analysed by the BCR method for the contents and bioavailability of aluminium, cadmium, chromium, cobalt, copper, lead, manganese, nickel and zinc.The total amounts of the elements are in the concentration range as reported for agricultural soils in different geographical regions. Only two soils of the capital Zagreb have higher concentrations of pollutant metals, such as chromium, cobalt, copper, lead, manganese and zinc. Regarding nutrients, all soils have met the needs of common garden plants.

Field-Tests versus Laboratory Methods for Determining Metal Pollutants in Soil Extracts

“…The particular extractable fractions of the total Nickel content ranged from 27.1% to 95.6%. These values are higher than that obtained for the first step of a sequential BCR extraction study of urban soils (Zeiner et al 2015a).…”

“…Based on the goal of the paper on testing the methods' applicability, no complete method validation was performed in course of this study. The ICP-OES method applied has been validated using soils and sediment-certified reference materials in a previous investigation, the obtained results being satisfying (Zeiner et al 2015a). The main criteria chosen were the LOD (which was calculated for the instrumental methods based on 3 σ), the accuracy, the ruggedness as well as the selectivity.…”

“…Thus, even if the total metal content in soil influences its bioavailability (Schreck et al 2011;Wijayawardena et al 2015;Yan et al 2018), other parameters have to be taken into account. These include, amongst others, the basic soil composition (mother rock, especially influenced by cation-binding substances like humic acid or clays) alongside soil characteristics (pH-value, cation exchange capacity -CEC) (Schreck et al 2011;Wijayawardena et al 2015;Zeiner et al 2015a), age of contamination (Schreck et al 2011;Wijayawardena et al 2015), way of soil treatment (Blaylock et al 1997), and target organisms tested (Juranović Cindrić et al 2019;Schreck et al 2011;Zeiner et al 2015b).…”

Supramolecular microextraction of cobalt from water samples before its microsampling flame atomic absorption spectrometric detection

“…The lack of cobalt in the human body causes anaemia. However, exposure to a large dose of cobalt leads to asthma and causes kidney and liver disorders [1][2][3][4][5][6]. Many routes for cobalt contamination in the environment have been reported, including mining and industrial activities [6,7].…”