Investigation of how oral bioaccessibility of potentially toxic elements in urban soils is affected by contaminant source and sampling techniques

Understanding their mobility, distribution, and geochemical interactions provides the necessary evidence to effectively assess the risks posed to people from exposure to soil contaminants.<br><br>The human health risk assessment often relies on total PTEs concentrations and assumes that contaminants are 100% bioavailable to humans.

This assumption sometimes may overestimate the risks and result in unnecessary remediations. Therefore, in vitro bioaccessibility tests are applied to estimate the bioavailable contaminant fraction providing more precise information.<br><br>However, the controlling factors over PTEs bioaccessibility in urban soils are not adequately understood. This research aims to address this gap by investigating the influence of contaminant source, solid-phase distribution of contaminants and soil sampling techniques, to enhance understanding of the controlling factors over PTEs bioaccessibility.<br><br>Belfast metropolitan area was selected as the study area because of the existence of Tellus geochemical dataset, various potential contaminant sources and a variety of bedrock geology.