In recent years, urbanization and industrialization have produced large amounts of heavy metals, which are highly toxic to both humans and the environment. This book presents a comprehensive overview of heavy metals including their physiochemical properties, toxicity, transfer in the environment, legislation, environmental impacts, and mitigation measures. Written by experts in the field, chapters include scientific research as well as case studies.

This book highlights the latest research on dissolved heavy metals in drinking water and their removal.

Heavy Metals in the Environment: Impact, Assessment, and Remediation synthesizes both fundamental concepts of heavy metal pollutants and state-of-the-art techniques and technologies for assessment and remediation. The book discusses the sources, origin and health risk assessment of heavy metals as well as the application of GIS, remote sensing and multivariate techniques in the assessment of heavy metals. The various contamination indices like contamination factor, geoaccumulation index, enrichment factor, and pollution index ecological risk index are also included to provide further context on the state of heavy metals in the environment. Covering a variety of approaches, techniques, and scenarios, this book is a key resource for environmental scientists and policymakers working to address environmental pollutants. Covers state-of-the-art techniques for the assessment and remediation of heavy metals Presents the interdisciplinary impacts of heavy metals, including human health, ecosystems and water quality Includes various contamination indices, such as contamination factor, geoaccumulation index, enrichment factor, pollution index and ecological risk index

In the past two decades there has been an increasing public awareness of the hazards that exist from the contamination of the environment by toxic substances. 'Heavy metals' and the terrestrial environment are but one facet of the impact of toxic substances on the natural environment, and the use of biological materials for indicating the occurrence of, and continually monitoring the presence of, these materials is a specific topic which is of considerable interest to a diverse range of individuals, organisations and disciplines. It was our intention when we first en visaged this book that it should contain a description of a range of circumstances in which biological monitoring techniques have been employed in the terrestrial environment and that it should be seen as a practical text which dealt with the merits, shortcomings and suitability of biological monitoring materials. Monitoring is, however, a manifold process. It serves not only to provide information on past and present concentrations of toxic materials in various components of the environ ment, but also to provide information on the processes of environmental release, transport, accumulation and toxicity. Indeed, this may be one of the greatest virtues of biological monitoring over other forms of monitor ing. According to the skill of the staff employed in the monitoring procedure, the information that is accrued can have a vastly different value.

Trace metals occur as natural constituents of the earth's crust, and are ever present constituents of soils, natural waters and living matter. The biological significance of this disparate assemblage of elements has gradually been uncovered during the twentieth century; the resultant picture is one of ever-increasing complexity. Several of these elements have been demonstrated to be essential to the functions of living organisms, others appear to only interact with living matter in a toxic manner, whilst an ever-decreasing number do not fall conveniently into either category. When the interactions between trace metals and plants are considered, one must take full account of the known chemical properties of each element. Consideration must be given to differences in chemical reactivity, solubility and to interactions with other inorganic and organic molecules. A clear understanding of the basic chemical properties of an element of interest is an essential pre-requisite to any subsequent consideration of its biological significance. Due consideration to basic chemical considerations is a theme which runs through the collection of chapters in both volumes.

This edited book, Soil Contamination - Threats and Sustainable Solutions, is intended to provide an update on different aspects of soil contamination exerted by a multiplicity of exogenous and endogenous causes. We hope that this book will continue to increase information from diverse sources and to give some real-life examples, extending the appreciation of the complexity of this subject in a way that may stimulate new approaches in relevant fields.

Fundamental societal changes resulted from the necessity of people to get organized in mining, transporting, processing, and circulating the heavy metals and their follow-up products, which in consequence resulted in a differentiation of society into diversified professions and even societal strata. Heavy metals are highly demanded technological materials, which drive welfare and progress of the human society, and often play essential metabolic roles. However, their eminent toxicity challenges the field of chemistry, physics, engineering, cleaner production, electronics, metabolomics, botany, biotechnology, and microbiology in an interdisciplinary and cross-sectorial manner. Today, all these scientific disciplines are called to dedicate their efforts in a synergistic way to avoid exposure of heavy metals into the eco- and biosphere, to reliably monitor and quantify heavy metal contamination, and to foster the development of novel strategies to remediate damage caused by heavy metals.