Sources of pollution and distribution of Pb, Cd and Hg in Wroclaw soils: Insight from chemical and Pb isotope composition
Abstract
Human activities in cities affect properties of urban soils. In particular, urban soils often contain high contents of harmful metals even in deeper horizons added to them from diverse sources over centuries of the city development.
This is reflected in complex distribution of metals in bulk soils with depth and the complex metal fractionation, but the exact sources of the metals are difficult to identify. This is also the situation in soils from Wroclaw, one of the largest cities in Poland.
Potentially harmful elements Pb, Cd and Hg were examined in six profiles located along the major communication route and compared to two non-urban soils profiles located close to the same route. In all of the urban profiles, Pb and Cd exceeded the element contents observed in nonurban profiles and showed an erratic distribution compared to the more predictable one in non-urban soils.
The differences between urban and non-urban profiles were explained as the result of contamination coming from more pollution sources in the case of urban soils, the conclusion supported by Pb isotope analyses. In fact, Pb isotopes showed that the contamination sources in urban soils included leaded petrol, coal combustion, smelting and possibly old pre-industrial ore processing, whereas leaded petrol and pre-industrial lead were the only possible anthropogenic sources in non-urban soils.
The comparison of Wrocoaw soils with those from cities of comparable size Krakow and Poznan show similar ranges of metal contents with implication that urban pollution oversteps diverse geogenic chemical background. On the other hand, the comparison with other European cities show large variability in metal contents and suggest that urban soils contamination is time integrated and reflects long-term industrial evolution of each country.