Indices of soil contamination by heavy metals – methodology of calculation for pollution assessment (minireview)

Abstract

This article provides the assessment of heavy metal soil pollution with using the calculation of various pollution indices and contains also summarization of the sources of heavy metal soil pollution. Twenty described indices of the assessment of soil pollution consist of two groups: single indices and total complex indices of pollution or contamination with relevant classes of pollution. This minireview provides also the classification of pollution indices in terms of the complex assessment of soil quality. In addition, based on the comparison of metal concentrations in soil-selected sites of the world and used indices of pollution or contamination in soils, the concentration of heavy metal in contaminated soils varied widely, and pollution indices confirmed the significant contribution of soil pollution from anthropogenic activities mainly in urban and industrial areas.

Heavy Metals in Sediments of Urban Streams: Contamination and Health Risk Assessment of Influencing Factors

“…Pollution degree was also assessed using contamination factor (CF) [32,33,37], pollution load index (PLI) [32][33][34]37], geoaccumulation index (I geo ) [38][39][40][41], potential ecological risk (RI) [23,32,34,37,38] and hazard quotient (HQ) [22,23,35,37,38,42].…”

“…where C mSample and C mBackground in (3) are as described above. Basing on the I geo value, 7 descriptive classes of sediments contamination presented in Table S2 are defined [37][38][39][40][41].…”

“…Five degrees of ecological risk for single element E j i and four classes of ecological risk RI for all factors combined are distinguished (Table S4). Although RI index was originally used as a diagnostic tool for the purpose of controlling water pollution, it was also used for assessing the quality of sediments in terms of HMs pollution [23,32,34,37,38].…”

“…Hazard quotient HQ [22,23,35,37,38,42] is used to evaluate the health risk to humans related to sediments dredging from RTs. This kind of evaluation is used to quantify both carcinogenic and non-carcinogenic risks to humans via three exposure pathways: ingestion, dermal contact and inhalation.…”

Introductory Chapter: How to Assess Metal Contamination in Soils?

“…The methods used for soil contamination assessment include both statistical and geochemical methods, which are critically evaluated by several researchers, e.g., Desaules [39], Morrow et al [48], D'Amore et al [49], Weissmannová and Pavlovský [50], Cai et al [51], Mizutani et al [52], and so forth.…”