Lead extraction from contaminated soils using

Figure 2. Lead ccxicentradon in solutitHi following extractitni of lead from contaminated soil using various extractive a nts.

Lead was extracted from nine replicates of NIST standard reference material 2709 (a contaminated soil) using various methods. The efficiencies of the various extraction methods were compared. 

The desorption and vapor extraction system (DAVES) uses a low-temperature fluidized bed to remove volatile and semivolatile organics such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), polynuclear aromatic compounds (PAHs), pentachlorophenol (PCP), volatile inorganics (tetraethyl lead), and some pesticides from soil, sludge, and sediment. The process generally treats waste containing less than 10% total organic contaminants and 30 to 95% solids. The process does not treat nonvolatile inorganic contaminants such as metals. 

The assessment of plant-available soil contents can frequently be achieved and validated by field experiments for nutritionally essential elements, and, for a few potentially toxic elements such as chromium, nickel and molybdenum, at the moderately elevated concentrations that can occur in agricultural situations. The validation of extraction methods, devised for agricultural and nutritional purposes, is much less easy to achieve when they are applied to heavy metals and other potentially toxic elements, especially at the higher concentrations obtained in industrially contaminated land. This is not surprising in view of the fact that for some heavy metals, for example lead, there is an effective root barrier, in many food crop plants, to their uptake and much of the metal enters plants not from the root but by deposition from the atmosphere on to leaves. In these circumstances little direct correlation would be expected between soil extractable contents and plant contents. For heavy metals and other potentially toxic elements, therefore, extraction methods are mainly of value for the assessment of the mobile and potentially mobile species rather than plant-available species. This assessment of mobile species contents may well, however, indicate the risk of plant availability in changing environmental conditions or changes in land use. 

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