Heavy metal distribution in Wrigley Head, Moston Brook, Greater Manchester,Northwest England : implications for risk assessment and remediation
Heavy metal contaminated sites pose potential environmental and health problems and represent a great barrier to the beneficial use of contaminated sites. Therefore, the study of heavy metal contamination is a vital knowledge gap which, when filled, will facilitate development of sound management strategies to minimise the adverse environmental impacts and ensure remediation of contaminated sites. Within the context of a study site in Greater Manchester, UK, desk and laboratory studies were conducted to: (a) evaluate the relationship between XRF and aqua regia/ICP-OES derived heavy metal data, (b) investigate the multiple sources of historical heavy metal contamination, (c) investigate small-scale spatial variation in heavy metal contamination across the study site, (d) assess heavy metal uptake by different herbaceous plant species, and (e) make recommendations to overcome the barrier of heavy metal contamination at the site. The results indicated that there was a strong relationship between the concentrations of heavy metals yielded by XRF and aqua regia/ICP-OES techniques across the study site and suggest that XRF is a rapid, cost effective and preferred technique for determination of targeted elements from the investigated soils compared to conventional aqua regia/ICP-OES technique. XRF technique demonstrated the capacity to measure the targeted elements from the investigated soils in relatively shorter times compared to conventional aqua regia/ICP-OES technique. The desk study revealed that the site suffers from multiple historical contamination and forms a legacy of potential source of unknown contaminants. This represents a big barrier to overcoming the challenges occasioned by historical contamination across the site. The site was heavily contaminated by multiple heavy metals at levels above UK and EU tolerable limits. There was a high spatial variation in heavy metal contamination across the site with Football Ground having relatively higher heavy metal contamination compared to the soils elsewhere around Wrigley Head. Based on the site conditions and levels of contamination at the site, revegetation of the site with plants and surface capping were suggested as feasible remediation options for the site. The study conducted to examine the uptake of heavy metals by herbaceous plants growing across the site suggests that metal uptake by the investigated plants was highly variable, leading to identification of some hyper-accumulating plants from the site. The findings obtained from this study have implications for environmental risk assessment and remediation of Wrigley Head, Moston Brook.
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