Search results for "contamination"

Soil Heavy Metals Patterns in the Torino Olympic Winter Games Venue (E.U.)

2008

International audience; The city of Torino (45°N, 7°E NW Italy) has a long history of heavy industry. Additional sources of potential pollutants originate from transport such as car emissions. We selected an area potentially at high risk of contamination: it is sandwiched between roads, the circular Turin highway and the motorway which connects to France, and a landfill where special and hazardous solid wastes from industry are disposed of. Our main aim was i) to discriminate between these sources of heavy metals (HM) and ii) to assess a simplified HM transfer scenario. We started with air diffusion models (inputs were meteo and chemistry of the particulate), then we described topsoils (12 …

REDUCED UPTAKE OF Cd AND Pb BY Miscanthus sinensis x giganteus CULTIVATED ON POLLUTED SOIL AND ITS USE AS BIOFUEL

2013

Contaminant Mobilization from Polluted Soils: Behavior and Reuse of Leaching Solutions

2020

Soil and water contamination by toxic elements or molecules cause risks of chemical pollutions. These pollutions can heavily affect resources and activities of humans and ecosystems. By nature, the remediation of environmental pollutions is a constraint, because its application is hampered by high costs. Soil and groundwater remediation implements a variety of strategies, technologies, and practices to face the diversity and the complexity of every cases. Contaminant recovery is among the three main strategies implemented for the remediation of contaminated soils, and contaminant separation or mobilization by water is widely used for this purpose. As water solubility is the driving force of…

Recognition of Trace Element Contamination Using Ficus macrophylla Leaves in Urban Environment

2020

Urban areas are characterized by numerous pollutants emitted by anthropic sources both in the form of solid and gaseous particulates. Biomonitoring is an easy, economical, and accessible approach for the determination of atmospheric pollutants. In this study, we used the leaves of Ficus macrophylla Desf. ex Pers., collected in the city of Palermo (Italy), to determine major and trace elements. Geogenic elements exhibited the highest concentrations, making up 99% of the weight of the analyzed elements (Ca, K, Mg, P, S, Na, Fe, and Al)

A review of ecological risk assessment and associated health risks with heavy metals in sediment from India

2020

Abstract Heavy metal (HM) pollution in sediment is a serious concern particularly in developing nations, warranting an extensive survey to understand the current situation and propose possible remedial measures. This paper compiles the data of HMs cadmium (Cd), iron (Fe), cobalt (Co), manganese (Mn), arsenic (As), lead (Pb), chromium (Cr), copper (Cu), zinc (Zn) and nickel (Ni) in aquatic sediment from India from 1979 to 2017. It was found that mean values of Cu, Co, Zn, Pb, As, and Cr in Indian sediment were high in comparison to the Australian Interim Sediment Quality Guidelines, World Surface Rock Average, and the Threshold Effect Level for freshwater ecosystems. Anthropogenic activities…

Use of lichens in detecting environmental risk and in geochemical prospecting

1995

This paper provides data on variations in the contents of As, Sb, Ni, V, Pb, Cu, Cr, Au, Zn, Sc, and Al, measured in the thalli of a saxicolous lichen species,Xanthoria calcicola Ochsner s.l., collected in northeastern Sicily, near an industrial zone and along a belt crossing areas of known ores containing sulfides of heavy metals. A total of 91 lichen samples were collected on roof tiles (39) and on rocks (52). In the industrial zone, analysis of lichen thalli revealed high contents of nickel and vanadium, decreasing at increasing distances from the source of contamination. The results have also revealed the versatility ofXanthoria calcicola in geochemical prospecting for heavy metals such…

Salt accumulation and effects within foliage of Tilia × vulgaris trees from the street greenery of Riga, Latvia

2020

International audience; Green infrastructures within sprawling cities provide essential ecosystem services, increasingly undermined by environmental stress. The main objective in this study was to relate the allocation patterns of NaCl contaminants to injury within foliage of lime trees mechanistically and distinguish between the effects of salt and other environmental stressors. Using field material representative of salt contamination levels in the street greenery of Riga, Latvia, the contribution of salt contaminants to structural and ultrastructural injury was analyzed, combining different microscopy techniques. On severely salt-polluted and dystrophic soils, the foliage of street lime …

Phytoscreening as an efficient tool to delineate chlorinated solvent sources at a chlor-alkali facility

2017

Chlorinated ethenes (CE) are among the most common volatile organic compounds (VOC) that contaminate groundwater, currently representing a major source of pollution worldwide. Phytoscreening has been developed and employed through different applications at numerous sites, where it was generally useful for detection of subsurface chlorinated solvents. We aimed at delineating subsurface CE contamination at a chlor-alkali facility using tree core data that we compared with soil data. For this investigation a total of 170 trees from experimental zones was sampled and analyzed for perchloroethene (PCE) and trichloroethene (TCE) concentrations, measured by solid phase microextraction gas chromato…

A multigenerational approach can detect early Cd pollution in Chironomus riparius.

2020

Abstract Cadmium (Cd) is a non-essential highly toxic metal and its presence in the environment has been a concern over the years. On the present study we adopt the spiked water exposure scenario to study early Cd contamination across five generations of the model organism Chironomus riparius. Animals were, at the beginning of each generation, submitted to 0, 1, 3.2, 10, 32 and 100 μg/L of Cd. Classical endpoints like total emergence, EmT50, fertility and the integrative fitness measure, population growth rate (PGR), were calculated at each generation. Results could demonstrate that exposure to brief and low Cd concentrations can affect all the measured endpoints and, therefore, initial Cd …

Soil plate bioassay: an effective method to determine ecotoxicological risks.

2010

Heavy metals have become one of the most serious anthropogenic stressors for plants and other living organisms. Having efficient and feasible bioassays available to assess the ecotoxicological risks deriving from soil pollution is necessary. This work determines pollution by Cd, Co, Cr, Cu, Ni, Pb, V and Zn in two soils used for growing rice from the Albufera Natural Park in Valencia (Spain). Both were submitted to a different degree of anthropic activity, and their ecotoxicological risk was assessed by four ecotoxicity tests to compare their effectiveness: Microtox test, Zucconi test, pot bioassay (PB) and soil plate bioassay (SPB). The sensitivity of three plant species (barley, cress and…