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Pollution characteristics and human health risk assessments of toxic metals and particle pollutants via soil and air using geoinformation in urbanized city of Pakistan

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Abstract

Toxic metals and particle pollutants in urbanized cities have significantly increased over the past few decades mainly due to rapid urbanization and unplanned infrastructure. This research aimed at estimating the concentration of toxic metals and particle pollutants and the associated risks to public health across different land-use settings including commercial area (CA), urban area (UA), residential area (RA), and industrial area (IA). A total of 47 samples for both soil and air were collected from different land-use settings of Faisalabad city in Pakistan. Mean concentrations of toxic metals such as Mn, Zn, Pb, Ni, Cr, Co, and Cd in all land-use settings were 92.68, 4.06, 1.34, 0.16, 0.07, 0.03, and 0.02 mg kg−1, respectively. Mean values of PM10, PM2.5, and Mn in all land-use settings were found 5.14, 1.34, and 1.9 times higher than the World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines. Mn was found as the most hazardous metal in terms of pollution load index (PLI) and contamination factor (CF) in the studied area. Health risk analysis for particle pollutants using air quality index (AQI) and geoinformation was found in the range between good to very critical for all the land-use settings. The hazard quotient (HQ) and hazard index (HI) were higher for children in comparison to adults, suggesting that children may be susceptible to potentially higher health risks. However, the cancer risk (CR) value for Pb ingestion (1.21 × 10−6) in children was lower than the permissible limit (1 × 10−4 to 1 × 10−6). Nonetheless, for Cr inhalation, CR value (1.09 × 10−8) was close to tolerable limits. Our findings can be of valuable assistance toward advancing our understanding of soil and air pollutions concerning public health in different land-use settings of the urbanized cities of Pakistan.

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Acknowledgements

All authors are thankful to Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology (NUIST) for computational and financial resources. Dr. George P. Petropoulos’s participation to this study was funded under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie “ENVISION-EO” project (grant agreement No 752094) and the author gratefully acknowledges the financial support provided. We also greatly appreciate the thoughtful comments and valuable suggestions from anonymous reviewers for the improvement of this manuscript.

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Funding

Dr. George P. Petropoulos’s participation to this study was funded under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie “ENVISION-EO” project (grant agreement No 752094) and the author gratefully acknowledges the financial support provided.

The authors greatly acknowledged the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2017YFC1501704, 2018YFC1407200, 2016YFA0600703); National Natural Science

Foundation of China (1975046), Higher Education Commission of Pakistan (1292) for financial support for this study.

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Khalid Mehmood: conceptualization, methodology, investigation, writing—original draft, data curation, visualization, writing—review and editing. Yansong Bao, Saif Ullah, Hamaad Raza Ahmad: supervision, project administration, funding acquisition, investigation, methodology, resources. Roman Abbas, Muhammad Mohsin Abrar, Adnan Mustafa, Alwaseela Abdalla: investigation, software, writing—review and editing. George P. Petropoulos, Katia Lasaridi: validation, writing—review and editing. Shah Fahad: conceptualization, methodology, validation, writing—review and editing. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Yansong Bao or Shah Fahad.

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Mehmood, K., Bao, Y., Abbas, R. et al. Pollution characteristics and human health risk assessments of toxic metals and particle pollutants via soil and air using geoinformation in urbanized city of Pakistan. Environ Sci Pollut Res 28, 58206–58220 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-14436-x

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