Arsenic and Heavy Metal Accumulation and Risk Assessment in Soils around Mining Areas: The Urad Houqi Area in Arid Northwest China as an Example

Shuai Song, Yuanjie Li, Lin Li, Maoyong Liu, Jing Li, Liang Wang and Chao Su
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Shuai Song: State Key Laboratory of Urban and Regional Ecology, Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100085, China
Yuanjie Li: Inner Mongolia Institute of Geological Environmental Monitoring, Hohhot 010020, China
Lin Li: Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region Metallurgy Research Institute, Hohhot 010010, China
Maoyong Liu: Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region Metallurgy Research Institute, Hohhot 010010, China
Jing Li: Key Laboratory of Ecosystem Network Observation and Modeling, Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China
Liang Wang: Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region Metallurgy Research Institute, Hohhot 010010, China
Chao Su: Institute of Loess Plateau, Shanxi University, Taiyuan 030006, China

IJERPH, 2018, vol. 15, issue 11, 1-17

Abstract: Mining activities make important contributions to economic growth, but they can also produce massive amounts of solid waste, such as tailings and metal accumulations. Taking the Urad Houqi mining area in Inner Mongolia as the study area, this study systematically assessed the contamination risk of arsenic and heavy metals in the soils of the study area and explored the contamination characteristics in a key polymetallic mining area. For the whole study area, based on the Nemerow comprehensive pollution method, almost half of the investigated sites were contaminated, and the most contaminated site was Urad Houqi Qianzhen Mineral Concentration Co., Ltd. (Bayannaoer, China), a cooperation between the lead and zinc mining industry. The assessment results indicated that Cd and As were the elements of greatest concern, followed by Pb, Cr and Hg. Particularly, for the typical Dongshengmiao mining area, when compared with the GB15618-1995 standard values, As, Zn and Cd posed the most serious contamination threat, while Cr and Ni exhibited clean conditions. In addition, the vertical distribution maps demonstrated that the contents of arsenic and metals in some soil profiles were correlated with sampling depth. Therefore, arsenic and heavy metals pose high threat to soil ecosystems in this area, there is encouragement for some control and remediation measures to be taken into effect.

Keywords: mineral mining; metal contamination; risk assessment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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