Fuzzy health risk assessment and integrated management of toxic elements exposure through soil-vegetables-farmer pathway near urban industrial complexes

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.142817Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Integrated health risk in a typical farmland near industrial complex was explored.

  • Priority control element and pathway were gotten via fuzzy health risk model.

  • Soil As exposure and vegetable consumption were important contributors of CR.

  • Bajifu Avenue-Green Road was priority control area by multi-spatial analysis.

  • Cd, Pb and As were correlated in migration patterns of soil-vegetable media.

Abstract

Urban industrial areas were being built globally, which decreased key geographical separation between agriculture and industrial areas, especially in developing countries. Now, limited studies concerned coordinated the vegetables and soil management for toxic elements (TEs) in this mixed land system. To fill this gap, an integrated environmental multi-media risk management method was explored based on laboratory analysis, health risk assessment, uncertainty control, and source apportionment. The Chinese Beihu area of Wuhan City was selected as a typical case and the measurements of Zn, Cr, Cu, Pb, As, and Cd in soil revealed that TEs pollution was slight and concentrations met the Chinese standards. Meanwhile, some vegetables exceeded corresponding standard limits. To further quantify negative health effects posed by the studied TEs both in soils and vegetables, an established fuzzy health risk assessment for farmers was employed and the results indicated that the soil exposure of As and the vegetable consumption needed the priority control. The carcinogenic risk (CR) of As in soil was [4.60E-6, 1.45E-5] and the cumulative CR (sum of CRAs, CRPb and CRCd) in leafy vegetables was [1.08E-4, 1.38E-4], which was higher than that of the other vegetables. Preventing soil oral exposure and reducing self-grown vegetable consumption (30%–50%) were proven as effective risk interventions via uncertainty control methods. Spatially, the risk grades under maximum membership principle decreased from south to north in the Beihu area, and the south area was identified as the priority control area. Source apportionment identified four source patterns (Zn-Cr-Cu, Pb, As, and Cd) for soil, and the probable bioaccumulation mechanisms for leafy vegetables by multivariate statistical analyses. Finally, the integrated management strategies were formulated from perspectives of the risk sources, exposure pathways and the scenario.

Introduction

Globally, more than 20 million ha of lands were found to be polluted and more than 50% were contaminated with toxic elements (TEs) (Sandeep et al., 2019). TEs pollution could transfer from the soil to vegetables, and finally to human body (Cao et al., 2020; Du et al., 2020; Ma et al., 2018). Exposure to TEs may generate bioactive destruction (Zhou et al., 2020) and cause negative effects on human health (Liu et al., 2020), including urinary cadmium (Nudrat et al., 2018), blood lead (Baloch et al., 2020), vascular complications (Mahfuzar et al., 2019), and even cancer (Wu et al., 2018). To manage the pollution risk of TEs and ensure food quality, most countries typically imposed maximum allowable regulation limits for soils and vegetables. Unfortunately, the current environmental quality standards for TEs in soils and vegetables were relatively independent and lacked an integrated consideration on TE mobility from soil to vegetables (Antoniadis et al., 2019a). When using local standard limits to manage farmland, many researchers found it was not scientifically insufficient to only focus on environmental quality of soil (Antoniadis et al., 2019b; Cao et al., 2020; Mehmood et al., 2019). For example, Chinese standard “Soil environment quality––Risk control standard for soil contamination of agricultural land” (GB 15618-2018) improved single-value management method and defined two limit values called “Risk Screen Values” and “Risk Intervention Values” according to the four soil pH range. However, Wang et al., 2019a, Wang et al., 2019b and Li et al. (2020) pointed that coordinated crops and soil management was still necessary, because some crops were found to exceed food standards “National standard for food safety: Limits of contaminants in food” (GB 2762-2017) even under minimal pollution condition in soil (TEs < “Risk Screen Values”). In fact, there were differences on bioaccumulation ability of TEs among different crops to varying degrees. Some studies told that vegetables species played the much more crucial effect role in TEs uptake than soil TEs concentration and pH (Huang et al., 2020). Family Liliaceae, Asteraceae and Brassicaceae in vegetables were generally of high TEs enrichment ability (Fang et al., 2019), such as Chinese cabbage (Mi et al., 2019), lettuce (Khan et al., 2020), garlic (Yuan et al., 2019), etc. Further, farmers were relatively vulnerable due to their high exposure to polluted soil and their consumption of self-grown pollution-enriched vegetables (Cheng et al., 2019; Pang et al., 2004). Facing the above issue, Li et al. (2020) established a complex five-level early warning system based on TEs concentration in soil and crops. Integrated risk-based environmental management was not only based on the concentration values but relied on identifying pollution sources, pathways, the exposed population and their diet habit of different crops (Jin et al., 2019). Exposure health risk assessment, as a decision-making assistance tool, was of great potential to comprehensively characterize the adverse effects of TEs from environmental multimedia. Therefore, it was of significance to explore a health risk management of TE bioaccumulation exposure through the soil–vegetables–farmer pathway (Atamalekia et al., 2019; Du et al., 2020; Ma et al., 2018).

From the view of study area, Huang et al. (2019) divided selected farmland study cases on TEs polished 2005–2017 into three groups, and farmland near industrial area or factory only accounted for 4%. Moreover, these cases often investigated the agricultural land surrounding a single factory (Ma et al., 2018; Wu et al., 2018) rather than that near an industrial complex (Cao et al., 2020). Industrial complex was a form of Industrial Symbiosis and disseminated at the global level (Catharine et al., 2015). Several factories could be co-located in a given area, and formed an industrial park, or complex or even a specific administrative district (Fraccascia and Giannoccaro, 2020). Because of land acquisition and conversion, the larger rural farmland became increasingly fragmented, and key geographical separation decreased between agriculture and industrial areas (Liu et al., 2019; Minh and Hiroyuki, 2017). As a result, farmlands might be polluted from the urban metabolism, industrial manufacture, agricultural activities, etc., but these farms also used to support vegetables and acted as an ecological buffer for urban areas (Bi et al., 2018). Simultaneously, due to the mixed land uses and management budget limit, uncertainty control was of importance during health risk assessment, especially in exposure scenarios and TEs spatial heterogeneity identification. A Monte Carlo simulation (Li et al., 2014; Tong et al., 2017) and fuzzy theory (Li et al., 2017) were often used to control the parameter uncertainty. The triangular fuzzy number (TFN) could be relatively suitable for risk management in this fragmented and complex farmland system due to its good applicability to deal with data which lack insufficient information or accuracy (Li et al., 2018). Through the maximum membership principle, the redundant information of fuzzy risk values could be transformed into a clear risk grade with its membership and location, which was convenient for decision makers to conduct spatial management (Li et al., 2017). Therefore, it was essential for the health risk-based integrated management strategy to apply efficient uncertainty quantification in the farmland near the urban industrial complex.

Qingshan-Chemical District (QCD) in Wuhan City was a typical case of Industrial Symbiosis including a historical steel industrial complex and a newly built ethylene chemical industrial complex. To our best knowledge, there were some researches on soil TEs monitoring for soil in the whole QCD (Yang et al., 2016; Qu et al., 2013) or on the vegetable bioaccumulation in small fields (Wan et al., 2014), while few studies were concerned with integrated farmer health risk assessments for TEs in soil–vegetables system. Further, the Beihu area, in the middle of QCD, has the history of vegetable planting for about 40 to 50 years up to 2020 (Qu et al., 2013) and was identified as a typical area. From the above, our major aims were (i) to sample and detect the concentrations of TEs in the soils and vegetables based on laboratory and statistical analysis throughout the Beihu area; (ii) to analyze exposure scenarios and establish TFN-fuzzy health risk assessment models via the soil–vegetables–farmer pathway; (iii) to carry out local health risk evaluation and formulate an integrated management policy on the exposed population and source apportionment based on spatial membership and multivariate statistics; and (iv) to summarize an integrated soil–vegetables risk management strategy on TEs in agricultural land near the urban industrial complex.

Section snippets

Study area and sampling

The Qingshan-Chemical District (QCD) lies in the east edge of Wuhan city, which is an important heavy industry base in the middle Yangtze River Economic Belt. This study area (30.62° to 30.68°N, 114.47° to 114.54°E) is named the Beihu area, and is between the China Baowu Wisco Group Co. Ltd. and China Korea (Wuhan) Petrochemical Co. Ltd. locations, two pillar industries complexes of QCD. As shown in Fig. 1a, there are also many small factories and related industrial parks as well as urban area,

Soil properties and TE concentrations in soils

Based on USDA soil texture triangle, the soil textures of 40 sampling sites mainly included sandy clay loam (10%), sand (20%), sandy loam (32.5%), and loamy sand (37.5%) (Fig. S3). The detected soil properties (pH, EC, HN, AP, K, AS, and TOC) and TEs data were clustered using the K-means, and the outlier data (sites 15#, 38#, and 40#) were removed to analyze individually. The descriptive statistic results are shown in Table 1. There were main differences in the EC and AS between the outliers

Conclusions

To discuss the health risk-based integrated management of TEs through the agriculture soil–vegetables–farmer pathway near industrial area, the Beihu agriculture land was selected as a typical case. Consequently, the TSCRAs and TCRLV were [4.60E-6, 1.45E-5] and [1.08E-4, 1.38E-4], respectively, and were selected as the main control pathway. This indicated that As in soil and the bioaccumulation of TEs (As, Cd, and Pb) required special attention. The spatial fuzzy risk assessment found that the

Author contribution statement

Xiyao Chen: Methodology, Writing- Original draft preparation;

Fei Li: Writing- Original draft preparation, Data analysis;

Hanzhen Du: Methodology, Reviewing;

Xiaolei Liu: Methodology, Formal analysis;

Siqi Liu: Data analysis, Investigation;

Jingdong Zhang: Project administration, Validation.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgments

This study was supported by National Social Science Foundation of China (Youth Fund: 19CGL042).

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