Abstract
Risk-based assessment is a way to evaluate the potential hazards of contaminated sites and is based on considering linkages between pollution sources, pathways, and receptors. These linkages can be broken by source reduction, pathway management, and modifying exposure of the receptors. In Taiwan, the Soil and Groundwater Pollution Remediation Act (SGWPR Act) uses one target regulation to evaluate the contamination status of soil and groundwater pollution. More than 600 sites contaminated with heavy metals (HMs) have been remediated and the costs of this process are always high. Besides using soil remediation techniques to remove contaminants from these sites, the selection of possible remediation methods to obtain rapid risk reduction is permissible and of increasing interest. This paper discusses previous soil remediation techniques applied to different sites in Taiwan and also clarified the differences of risk assessment before and after soil remediation obtained by applying different risk assessment models. This paper also includes many case studies on: (1) food safety risk assessment for brown rice growing in a HMs-contaminated site; (2) a tiered approach to health risk assessment for a contaminated site; (3) risk assessment for phytoremediation techniques applied in HMs-contaminated sites; and (4) soil remediation cost analysis for contaminated sites in Taiwan.
Highlights
Toxicology factors, cancer slope factors (SF) for carcinogenic risk, and reference dose (RfD) for non-carcinogenic risk were taken from the database in the Integrated Risk Information System, which is built by USEPA [25]
The results showed that the study site was contaminated with heavy metals (HMs), the calculated values of hazard quotient (HQ) and TR for this site were less than unity and 10−6, respectively (Tables 8, 9)
Many HMs-contaminated sites have been found in Taiwan during the last two decades resulting mainly from irrigation systems contaminated by wastewater illegally discharged from industrial parks located in the western regions of Taiwan
Summary
Contaminated lands have been of concern in Taiwan for about three decades. Until now, soil remediation techniques and regulatory systems have been used to combat soil contamination, for human and ecological health reasons. Heavy metal (HM) contamination poses a major environmental and human health threat, and the cleanup of these soils continues to be time-costly and difficult. 10 mg/kg in the soils and 0.5 mg/kg in the rice grain at the sites, respectively. Since this Cd-rice pollution event, an increasing number of soils contaminated with HMs have been reported. These pollution events impacted the environmental regulation and food safety in Taiwan dramatically [3]. There are eight chapters and 57 articles in the SGWPR Act. When the concentrations of contaminants exceed the soil control standard (SCS), this site will be announced as a “control site”.
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