Abstract
Lead (Pb) soil contamination in urban environments represents a considerable health risk for exposed populations, which often include environmental justice communities. In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (PA), Pb pollution is a major concern primarily due to extensive historical Pb-smelting/processing activity and legacy use of Pb-based paints and leaded gasoline. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) organized and/or compiled community-driven soil sampling campaigns to investigate Pb content in surface soils across Philadelphia. Using these data (n = 1277), combined with our own dataset (n = 1388), we explored the spatial distribution of Pb content in soils across the city using ArcGIS. While assessing Zone Improvement Plan (ZIP)-code level data, we found strong correlations between factors, such as the percentage of children with elevated blood lead levels (% EBLL) and % minority population as well as between % EBLL and % children in poverty. We developed a “Lead Index” that took demographics, median measured Pb-in-soil content, and % EBLLs into account to identify ZIP codes in need of further assessment. Our results will be used to help lower the Pb-exposure risk for vulnerable children living in disproportionately burdened communities.
Highlights
Heavy metal pollution is a significant concern in industrial and post-industrial cities worldwide [1,2,3,4]
We retrieved much of these data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) following a public records request utilizing the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) protocol; of the 2665 soil data points used in the present paper, 1277 were compiled by the USEPA and the remaining were from, or in collaboration with, the University of Pennsylvania (Table S1b)
Lesser measured Zone Improvement Plan (ZIP) codes are all in Northeast Philadelphia and were not targeted during the sampling campaigns
Summary
Heavy metal pollution is a significant concern in industrial and post-industrial cities worldwide [1,2,3,4]. Common sources of problematic Pb pollution include legacy Pb-based paints, emissions from former. It is difficult to distinguish between pollutants stemming from human activities and those from pedo-chemical effects, as source apportionment of Pb contamination typically requires detailed isotope analysis and modeling efforts [16,17,18]. Heavy metal pollution has been studied using environmental media, including soils and urban road dust [19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27]. Soils and road dusts may record the legacy of an urban environment as the two media act as both source and sink for contaminants [28]. Lead is persistent in the environment [31] and can exist in soil longer
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