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Heavy-Metal Soil Contamination: Sources, Opportunities, and Sustainable Solutions

A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Environmental Sustainability and Applications".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 25 July 2025 | Viewed by 781

Special Issue Editor

Civil Engineering Department, Universidad Católica de la Santísima Concepción, Concepción, Chile
Interests: soil and groundwater contamination; potentially toxic elements
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue will offer an interdisciplinary perspective and apply new insights to examine soil contamination and promote environmentally sustainable management. This challenge necessitates the development of diverse and comprehensive (multi-media, multi-analytic, and multi-elemental) approaches to assessing and preventing pollution. With urban growth and the ongoing expansion of populations into abandoned industrial, mining, urban, traffic, and military areas, innovative technologies for soil modeling processes and remediation represent an increasingly important research topic.

We welcome the submission of papers on the occurrence, migration, and accumulation of rare-earth elements and potentially toxic elements in soils and dust (from the street, attic, or household), originating from various natural sources (e.g., volcanic activity, forest fires, soil erosion, and biological materials) and anthropogenic sources (e.g., vehicular emissions, industry, metallurgy, mining, and combustion). Sustainability is a new priority in the remediation of contaminated land. Research on the behavior and spatial distribution of both native and non-native potentially harmful elements in soils is essential to the restoration of contaminated sites. The potential of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and deep learning (DL) to tackle these challenges is significant, as the advent of these technologies has transformed data management and analysis processes.

Dr. Pedro Tume
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • potentially toxic elements
  • polluted area
  • health risk assessment
  • soil and groundwater contamination

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

22 pages, 3900 KiB  
Article
Evaluating the Share of Atmospheric Deposition of Priority Pollutants Cadmium and Lead in Soil Pollution with the Use of Ombrotrophic Peat Bogs as Natural Archives
by Ewa Miszczak, Sebastian Stefaniak, Eiliv Steinnes and Irena Twardowska
Sustainability 2024, 16(23), 10709; https://doi.org/10.3390/su162310709 - 6 Dec 2024
Viewed by 477
Abstract
Sustainable soil resource management requires detailed knowledge of soil pollution sources and their share in total pollution level. Spatial pollution caused by the total cumulative atmospheric deposition remains largely unknown, as the biggest pollutant emissions occurred in XIX/XX centuries. The use of ombrotrophic [...] Read more.
Sustainable soil resource management requires detailed knowledge of soil pollution sources and their share in total pollution level. Spatial pollution caused by the total cumulative atmospheric deposition remains largely unknown, as the biggest pollutant emissions occurred in XIX/XX centuries. The use of ombrotrophic peatlands that are specific isolated ecosystems fed only through atmospheric deposition may serve as its natural archives. Accumulation of Cd and Pb from atmospheric deposition in undisturbed soil layers in relation to their total deposited cumulative loads recorded in the ombrotrophic peat bog was exemplified in the Izera Mountains, an area historically heavily affected with the transboundary long-range transmission of pollutants from Germany, the Czech Republic, and Poland. Balance of deposited Cd and Pb loads in soil in relation to the total cumulative deposition determined from peat records showed 30% depletion of Cd load in the soil profile due to washout of mobile phases, while that of Pb practically did not decline. The deposited element accumulation and release/depletion in undisturbed soil profiles can thus be quantified in relation to the total cumulative load of atmospheric deposition. This shows a new prospective application of peat bog records as monitors of total cumulative loads of trace elements supplied to soils from atmospheric deposition. Full article
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