Abstract
River basin metal pollution originates from heavy industries (plating, automobile) and from urban sources (Paris conurbation: 2740 km(2), 9.47 million inhabitants). The natural sources of metal have been found to be limited due to sedimentary nature of this catchment and to the very low river sediment transport (10 t km(-2) y(-1)). Several types of data have been collected to build the metal budget within the whole Seine River basin: field surveys, economical statistics and environmental models. Environmental contamination and related fluxes have been measured on atmospheric fallout, rural streams particles, and Seine River particles upstream and downstream of Paris and at river mouth. Metal pathways and budgets have been set up for (i) a typical cultivated area, (ii) a Paris combined sewer system, (iii) Paris conurbation and (iv) the whole catchment metal retention effect in floodplain and dredged material. Metal fluxes to the estuary have been decomposed into natural, urban domestic and other sources. The latter are within 1-2 orders of magnitude larger than waste water fluxes directly released into rivers according to an industrial census. These fluxes have been further compared to the annual use (1994-2003) of these metals. Metal excess fluxes exported by the river are now a marginal leak of metal inputs to the catchment (i.e. "raw" metals, metals in goods, atmospheric fallout), generally from 0.2 to 5 per thousand. However, due to the very limited dilution power in this basin, the contamination of particles is still relatively high. The Seine River basin is gradually storing metals, mostly in manufactured products used in construction, but also in various waste dumps, industrial soils, agricultural and flood plain soils.
Highlights
Heavy metals in pristine river catchments originates from natural sources and processes as chemical weathering, soil erosion, fallout of natural aerosols from marine, volcanic or arid soils sources (Avila et al, 1998; Gaillardet et al, 2003)
As for many other river basins the sediment budget of the Seine River basin assessed in this paper presents uncertainty and perhaps bias
In the raw waste water collected at Seine Aval waste water treatment plant (SA-waste water treatment plants (WWTP)) inlet, Cr, Cu, Fe and Pb were mainly found as particulate metals, whereas Cd and Ni were mostly dissolved
Summary
Heavy metals in pristine river catchments originates from natural sources and processes as chemical weathering, soil erosion, fallout of natural aerosols from marine, volcanic or arid soils sources (Avila et al, 1998; Gaillardet et al, 2003). Few metal budgets are available on river catchments as for the Rhine River (Stigliani et al, 1993; Stigliani and Jaffé, 1993), at the city scale as for Stockholm (Bergbäck et al, 2001; Sörme and Lagerkvist, 2002), in soils (Spiegel et al, 2003) and agrosystems (Moolenar and Lexmond, 1998) and on the generic anthroposphere in which metals are one type of material among others e.g. C, N or P (Baccini and Brunner, 1991; Brunner and Rechberger, 2003) Such budgets combine multiple types of data from environmental monitoring and economical statistics and from specific process studies conducted in atmosphere, soils, aquatic and artificial environments (sewers, impervious urban areas etc.). How important are the metal leaks from human activities, compared to the overall circulation of metal?
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