Exposure Factors in Health Risk Assessment of Heavy Metal(loid)s in Soil and Sediment

Abstract

Heavy metal(loid)s (HMs) play an important role in economic development since they are used in various branches of industry. However, all industrial activities emit HMs into the environment, where they are no longer useful but potentially toxic. It has been observed that HMs enter the soil and sediment, and potential human health risk may arise due to their excessive accumulation. Having in mind the importance of assessing the risk due to HMs in these media, we analyzed published works in the last decade and created a summary of exposure factors in health risk models for HMs in soil and sediment. This analysis revealed a remarkable increase in the number of publications about health risk assessment of HMs, especially in the last few years. Since many differences in the values of the exposure factors and their distributions were noted, this study focused on elucidating these differences. Non-carcinogenic and carcinogenic health risk assessment models were evaluated through a deterministic approach that is prevalent in use, and a probabilistic one, which is gaining more and more attention in research. In the end, guided by the studied literature, we propose the values and distributions for the exposure factors.