Abstract
A bioassay battery-integrated index was applied to different soils sampled from a former coke factory, with the aim to evaluate the discriminating capacity of the Ecoscore system (ES) to assess the environmental hazard of PAH-polluted soils. Two soils from a former coke factory, polluted with polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), were evaluated for their ecotoxicity to terrestrial and aquatic organisms and their genotoxicity. These soils have been already presented in a previous paper but data have been reanalyzed for the present article in an endeavor to standardize the ES. One soil was sampled in the untreated site and the second underwent a windrow treatment. While these soils had a similar total concentrations of US-EPA 16PAHs (around 3000 mg kg−1), different ecoscores were obtained when subjected to a set of solid- and liquid-phase bioassays measuring acute, chronic, and genotoxic effects. The total PAH content of the soil is not a pertinent parameter to assess soil pollution hazards contrary to the ES. ES is a robust method to classify soils according to their toxicity level. Four levels of toxicity have been defined: no (ecoscore = 0), weak (0 < ecoscore ≤33), moderate (33 < ecoscore ≤67), and strong toxicity (67 < ecoscore ≤ 100). The combination of chemical and toxicological data highlights the relationship between three-ring PAHs and acute ecotoxicity. Conversely, chronic effects of water extracts on algal growth could be explained by high molecular weight PAHs, such as five- and six-ring PAHs.
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Acknowledgements
The present study was performed with a financial support from the ADEME (Agence de l’Environnement et de la Maîtrise de l’Énergie, France), which is greatly acknowledged. We thank Total (France) and Charbonnages de France (France) to put industrial sites at our disposal.
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Lors, C., Ponge, JF. & Damidot, D. Environmental hazard assessment by the Ecoscore system to discriminate PAH-polluted soils. Environ Sci Pollut Res 25, 26747–26756 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-017-9906-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-017-9906-4