Environ. Sci. Technol. 2009, 43, 6385–6390
Adhesion and Enrichment of Metals on Human Hands from Contaminated Soil at an Arctic Urban Brownfield S T E V E N D . S I C I L I A N O , * ,†,‡ K . J A M E S , ‡ G U I Y I N Z H A N G , † A L E X I S N . S C H A F E R , †,‡ AND J. DEREK PEAK† Department of Soil Science, University of Saskatchewan, 51 Campus Drive, Saskatoon, SK, S7N 5A8, Canada, and Toxicology Group, University of Saskatchewan, 44 Campus Drive, Saskatoon, SK, S7N 5B3, Canada
Received April 9, 2009. Revised manuscript received June 5, 2009. Accepted June 18, 2009.
Human exposure to contaminated soils drives clean up criteria at many urban brownfields. Current risk assessment guidelines assume that humans ingest some fraction of soil smaller than 4 mm but have no estimates of what fraction of soil is ingested by humans. Here, we evaluated soil adherence to human hands for 13 agricultural soils from Saskatchewan, Canada and 17 different soils from a brownfield located in Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada. In addition, we estimated average particle size adhering to human hands for residents of a northern urban setting. Further, we estimated how metal concentrations differed between the adhered and bulk (
