Risk Assessment and Source Apportionment of Heavy Metals in Soils from Handan City

Abstract

Soil-heavy metals are potentially harmful to the ecosystem and human health. Quantifying heavy metals sources is conducive to pollution control. In this study, 64 surface-soil samples were collected in Handan city. Cr, Mn, Ni, Cu, Zn, Cd and Pb were determined; then, their spatial distribution in the sampling area was drawn by ArcGIS. The pollution index (PI) method, geo-accumulation index (Igeo) method, Nemerow integrated pollution index (NIPI) and pollution load index (PLI) were used to evaluate the pollution level of heavy metals in surface soil; then, an ecological and health risk assessment of soil-heavy metals was carried out. Combined with the spatial distribution, correlation analysis, cluster analysis, PCA and PMF model, the pollution sources of heavy metals in soil were identified and apportioned. The results showed that the average content of Cd was nearly ten times that of the background limit, which was the most serious among the studied metals. In terms of non-carcinogenic risk, Cr had the highest value, followed by Pb. In terms of carcinogenic risk, Cd, Cr, and Ni had an acceptable or tolerable risk. Three pollution sources were identified by cluster analysis and PCA, including traffic sources with Cu, Pb and Cd as main loads, industrial sources with Mn, Cd and Zn as main loads, and natural sources with Cr and Ni as main loads. The PMF model analyzed three main factors: traffic source (17.61%), natural source (28.62%) and industrial source (53.77%). The source categories and the main load elements obtained from the source apportionment results were consistent with the source identification results.

Quantitative source apportionment of heavy metals in atmospheric deposition of a typical heavily polluted city in Northern China: Comparison of PMF and UNMIX

“…The heavy metal concentration in the soil around each atmospheric deposition sampling site can be seen in our previous study (Zhang et al, 2021). Here, we propose an assessment model to evaluate the accumulation of heavy metals from atmospheric deposition in the soil (more details are shown in Supplementary Material S1).…”

“…Previous research on air pollution in Handan mainly focused on ambient, fine air-particulate matter and the soil. Zhang et al (2021) and Cai et al (2021) found that the industrial source was the main source of heavy metals in the soil and PM 2.5 in the Handan urban area, which account for 53.77% and 47.94%, respectively. The local industrial dust really had significant impacts on the concentration of heavy metals in the environment.…”

Potentially Toxic Elements in Oasis Agricultural Soils Caused by High-Intensity Exploitation in the Piedmont Zone of the Tianshan Mountains, China

“…PTEs are affected by both the natural environments in which they form and the degree of influence from anthropogenic activity [14,15]. There are many existing models and methods for the apportionment of soil pollution sources, including multivariate statistical methods [16], isotope tracing methods [17,18], receptor models of positive matrix factorization (PMF) [19][20][21], the chemical mass balance (CMB) model [22], and absolute principal component score-multiple linear regression (APCS-MLR) [23]. The multivariate statistical method qualitatively determines the sources of certain PTEs by identifying PTEs with similar distribution characteristics.…”