Heavy metals in the environment: sources, interactions and human health

Abstract

This Special Issue of Environmental Science and Pollution Research collects together a number of contributions originally presented at the 16th International Conference on Heavy Metals in the Environment (ICHMET), held in Rome from the 23rd to the 27th of September 2012. The ICHMET series of conferences, which began in Toronto, Canada in 1975, has a history of being interdisciplinary, covering a range of environmental and biological media and the gamut of toxic metals. The 2012 conference was no exception, although the imminence of the fifth session of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC) to prepare a global legally binding instrument on mercury, which was held in Geneva in January 2013, and led to the Minamata Convention on Mercury, obviously meant that mercury was a major talking point during the conference. The Conference agenda included numerous sessions on toxic metals in environmental media, food and their impact on human and ecosystem well being, as well as biomonitoring, remediation and analytical techniques. The inclusion of some new sessions, however, set ICHMET 16 apart from previous conferences in the series. Given the, at the time forthcoming, United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) global mercury assessment 2013 (http://www.unep.org/publications/contents/ pub_details_search.asp?ID=6282), the fifth INC meeting and the Minamata convention (http://www.mercuryconvention.org/) , there was a session dedicated to the UNEP Global Mercury Partnership (http://www.unep.org/hazardoussubstances/ Mercury/GlobalMercuryPartnership/tabid/1253/Default.aspx) and also sessions based on the first results from the EU funded Global Mercury Observation System project (www.gmos.eu). Another new inclusion in the conference program for ICHMET 16 were the two sessions on interoperability, which highlighted the importance of data availability, comparability, accessibility and visibility within coordinated observational networks such as GEO/GEOSS (http://www.earthobservations. org/geoss.shtml). These themes were further developed in the sessions dedicated to ‘Merging Science and Policy’. Three short courses before the official opening of the conference gave attendees the chance to broaden their knowledge of ‘Data publishing and Interoperability technologies enabled by GEOSS’, which was facilitated by Dr. Stefano Nativi, from the Institute of Atmospheric Pollution Research (CNR-IIA), Italy, ‘Non-traditional Stable Metal Isotopes in the Environmental Sciences’ with Dr. Oleg Pokrovsky from the Laboratory of Georesources and Environment, Toulouse (CNRS), France and also ‘The Mercury Game: A Role-Playing Simulation about the role of science in international policy’ facilitated by Prof. Noelle Selin from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA. This Special Issue cannot hope to encompass the diversity and the originality of the research presented at ICHMET 16; however, as editors, we hope that the Research Articles collected here will encourage environmental scientists to consider participating in the next ICHMET, which is to be held in Guiyang, China from the 22nd to the 26th of September 2014. The articles in this Special Issue cover issues concerning metals associated with atmospheric particulate matter, seasonal variation in particulate composition and spatial variation Responsible editor: Philippe Garrigues S. Cinnirella : I. M. Hedgecock (*) : F. Sprovieri CNR Institute of Atmospheric Pollution Research (Rende Section), c/o UNICAL, Rende 87036, Italy e-mail: i.hedgecock@iia.cnr.it