Environmental Science and Pollution Research

, Volume 22, Issue 13, pp 9766–9774 | Cite as

Changes of polybrominated diphenyl ethers and polychlorinated biphenyls in surface soils from urban agglomeration of the Yangtze River Delta, in China between 2003 and 2012

  • Shuang-Xin Shi
  • Ye-Ru Huang
  • Li Zhou
  • Li-Fei Zhang
  • Liang Dong
  • Wen-Long Yang
  • Xiu-Lan Zhang
Research Article
First Online:
Received:
Accepted:

Abstract

Surface soil samples were collected from urban agglomeration of the Yangtze River Delta (YRD), China in 2003 and 2012, respectively. Polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) were analyzed to determine if there were any changes in their levels and compositional profiles between the two sampling years. The concentrations of Σ8PBDEs ranged from 0.553 to 13.0 μg kg−1(with the mean of 3.31 μg kg−1) in the 2003 samples and from 1.01 to 43.2 μg/kg (with the mean of 10.0 μg kg−1) in the 2012 samples. The concentrations of Σ32PCBs ranged from 0.301 to 3.29 μg kg−1(with the mean of 1.01 μg kg−1) in the 2003 samples and from 0.205 to 3.96 μg/kg (with the mean of 0.991 μg kg−1) in the 2012 samples. The comparisons between the 2012 and 2003 data showed that PBDEs concentrations increased over the years, but PCB concentrations did not change much. BDE-209 was the major BDE congener in both the 2003 and 2012 samples, indicating that the dominant PBDE mixture production and usage in the YRD had been the commercial deca-BDE mixture. Investigation of the PBDE congener profiles indicated that there had been new input of octa-BDEs in this region in recent years. Little change was found for the pattern of PCBs congener profiles between 2 years’ samples. As such, spatial distributions of PBDEs or PCBs in surface soil samples reflected a gradient (from high to low) from the central cities out to rural areas in both the 2003 and 2012 data. In addition, high concentrations of PBDEs were observed in the industrial and residential areas, whereas high concentrations of PCBs were only observed in the industrial areas.

Keywords

Surface soil Polybrominated diphenyl ethers Polychlorinated biphenyls Urban agglomeration Yangtze River Delta 
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Notes

Acknowledgments

We are grateful for financial support from the National Basic Research Program of China (no. 2009CB42160X).

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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015

Authors and Affiliations

  • Shuang-Xin Shi
    • 1
  • Ye-Ru Huang
    • 1
  • Li Zhou
    • 1
  • Li-Fei Zhang
    • 1
  • Liang Dong
    • 1
  • Wen-Long Yang
    • 1
  • Xiu-Lan Zhang
    • 1
  1. 1.National Research Center for Environmental Analysis and MeasurementsDioxin Pollution Control Key Laboratory of State Environmental Protection AdministrationBeijingChina

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