Research Progress on Heavy Metals Pollution in the Soil of Smelting Sites in China

Abstract

Contamination by heavy metals is a significant issue worldwide. In recent decades, soil heavy metals pollutants in China had adverse impacts on soil quality and threatened food security and human health. Anthropogenic inputs mainly generate heavy metal contamination in China. In this review, the approaches were used in these investigations, focusing on geochemical strategies and metal isotope methods, particularly useful for determining the pathway of mining and smelting derived pollution in the soil. Our findings indicate that heavy metal distribution substantially impacts topsoils around mining and smelting sites, which release massive amounts of heavy metals into the environment. Furthermore, heavy metal contamination and related hazards posed by Pb, Cd, As, and Hg are more severe to plants, soil organisms, and humans. It’s worth observing that kids are particularly vulnerable to Pb toxicity. And this review also provides novel approaches to control and reduce the impacts of heavy metal pollution. Hydrometallurgy offers a potential method for extracting metals and removing potentially harmful heavy metals from waste to reduce pollution. However, environmentally friendly remediation of contaminated sites is a significant challenge. This paper also evaluates current technological advancements in the remediation of polluted soil, such as stabilization/solidification, natural attenuation, electrokinetic remediation, soil washing, and phytoremediation. The ability of biological approaches, especially phytoremediation, is cost-effective and favorable to the environment.

Ecological impact of heavy metals on aquatic environment with reference to fish and human health

“…Mining, smelting, power plant waste, and industrial and agricultural operations are all common anthropogenic sources of heavy metals. Certain metals are released into the environment through mining and the extraction of certain elements from their ores (Adnan et al, 2022). Heavy metals released into the atmosphere by mining, smelting, and other industrial activities are caused by dry and wet deposition.…”

Potential Mechanism of Long-Term Immobilization of Pb/Cd by Layered Double Hydroxide Doped Chicken-Manure Biochar

“…Large-scale smelting activities make the soil of the smelting site suffer from the continuous input of high levels of harmful heavy metals [2][3][4][5][6], which pose a threat to the soil ecosystem and human health. According to recent reports [7,8], Pb(II) and Cd(II) are the most widespread heavy metals in smelting site soils in China. Pb(II) is non-biodegradable and highly carcinogenic [9][10][11], while Cd(II) is highly mobile and toxic [12,13].…”

Trace Metals Assessment in Soils and Sediments near the Abandoned Mine of “El Abed” Pb-Zn deposit – Northwestern Algeria

“…There are two sources of trace metals, the human source is the mining and fertilizer industries, and the natural source is the crust (Romic & Romic, 2003).To identify sources and understand the spatial variability of heavy metals in soils, their concentrations and spatiotemporal determination are determined. The distribution (Wang et al, 2020) is used to calculate pollution indices and determine their toxicity (Adnan et al, 2022), due to the high toxicity of arsenic (As), cadmium (Cd), lead (Pb) and mercury (Hg) are among the priority minerals available to study pollution (Seklaoui et al, 2016;Xu et al, 2021). The African continent is an important source of mineral resources in the world with 30%, and the largest reserves of minerals such as gold (Darimani et al, 2013).…”