Chemical Speciation, Contamination, Human Health Risk Assessment, and Source Identification of Heavy Metals in Soils Composted with Swine Manure

ABSTRACT

Heavy metal accumulation in the swine manure composting vegetable soil continues to attract attention for the reason that heavy metals are often added to animal feeds as growth promoters. The seven heavy metals (Cr, Ni, Cu, Zn, As, Cd, and Pb) concentration and chemical speciation in soil samples from 15 swine manure composting vegetable fields of Jiangxi Province were analyzed. The results showed that the average concentration of Cr, Ni Cu, Zn, As, Cd, and Pb was 48.46 ± 5.58 mg/kg, 29.06 ± 1.80 mg/kg, 48.16 ± 9.69 mg/kg, 142.32 ± 38.71 mg/kg, 10.62 ± 2.76 mg/kg, 0.13 ± 0.04 mg/kg, and 15.75 ± 2.36 mg/kg, respectively. The average concentration of Ni, Cu, Zn, and Cd was 1.12, 1.89, 1.77, and 1.17 times greater than their background values, whereas the average concentration of Cr, As, and Pb was lower than their background values. The chemical speciation analysis indicated that these heavy metals were dominated by residual fractions and have low mobility and bioavailability. The Geo-accumulation index (I_geo) indicated that the soils were unpolluted with Cr, Ni, As, Cd, and Pb, while unpolluted to moderately polluted with Cu and Zn. The Nemerow comprehensive pollution index suggested that the soils were lightly polluted with heavy metals. They posed a considerable potential ecological risk to the soils. Based on the risk assessment code (RAC), these heavy metals exhibited no to medium risks. There was little non-carcinogenic risk and acceptable carcinogenic risk to humans from the heavy metals. Principal component analysis (PCA) indicated that Ni, Cu, Zn, and Cd originated from the use of a large quantity of swine manure; Pb and As mainly derived from atmospheric deposition; Cr was mainly from natural sources.

KEYWORDS:

• Heavy metal
• health risk
• compost
• swine manure
• soil

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Correction

Acknowledgments

We thank the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 41663004), Natural Science Foundation of Jiangxi Province, China (No. 20114BAB213023), and the Open Project Program of State Key Laboratory of Food Science and Technology, Nanchang University (No. SKLF-KF-201619).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/15320383.2024.2364000.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Author Contributions

Maolan Wang: Project administration, Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Investigation, Data curation, Writing - Original draft preparation, Writing - Review & Editing, Funding acquisition. Helian Liu: Concentration analysis, Writing - Review & Editing. Wanting Zhou: Investigation.

Data availability statement

Data will be made available on request.

Correction Statement

This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15320383.2024.2367867.

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 41663004), the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangxi Province (No.20114BAB213023) and the Open Project Program of State Key Laboratory of Food Science and Technology, Nanchang University (No. SKLF-KF-201619).