Risk Assessment of Soil Contamination with Heavy Metals from Municipal Sewage Sludge

Featured Application The work can be used to establish new guidelines for the natural use of municipal sewage sludge. Sewage sludge (SS) is a by-product of processes conducted during the treatment of wastewater. It can be used in many different ways. One of them is the use of SS in agriculture as an organic fertiliser, but the main criterion for such use is the heavy metals (HMs) content. Knowledge of the total content of HMs in SS does not translate into the danger it may pose. The toxicity of metals is largely dependent on their mobility. The mobility of SS from three different wastewater treatment plants (WWTP) of the swietokrzyskie Voivodeship, which were characterised by an increased zinc content, was examined in this study. The aim of the study was to prove whether the high level of zinc in SS actually disqualifies the possibility of its natural use. Calculations were made for five environmental hazard indicators: the geoaccumulation index of heavy metals in soil (I-geo), potential environmental risk indicator (PERI), risk assessment code (RAC), environmental risk factor (ERF), and the authors' own environmental risk determinant (ERD) indicator. The obtained results show how important mobility analysis is when assessing the possibility of natural use of SS.

Automated summary

This study aimed to prove whether the high level of zinc in sewage sludge actually disqualifies the possibility of its natural use, and demonstrated the importance of mobility analysis in assessing the possibility of natural use of sewage sludge through calculations of environmental hazard indicators.