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Characteristics of PAHs in farmland soil and rainfall runoff in Tianjin, China

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Abstract

Rainfall runoff can remove certain amounts of pollutants from contaminated farmland soil and result in a decline in water quality. However, the leaching behaviors of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) with rainfall have been rarely reported due to wide variations in the soil compositions, rainfall conditions, and sources of soil PAHs in complex farmland ecosystems. In this paper, the levels, spatial distributions, and composition profiles of PAHs in 30 farmland soil samples and 49 rainfall-runoff samples from the Tianjin region in 2012 were studied to investigate their leaching behaviors caused by rainfall runoff. The contents of the Σ16PAHs ranged from 58.53 to 3137.90 μg/kg in the soil and 146.58 to 3636.59 μg/L in the runoff. In total, most of the soil sampling sites (23 of 30) were contaminated, and biomass and petroleum combustion were proposed as the main sources of the soil PAHs. Both the spatial distributions of the soil and the runoff PAHs show a decreasing trend moving away from the downtown, which suggested that the leaching behaviors of PAHs in a larger region during rainfall may be mainly affected by the compounds themselves. In addition, 4- and 5-ring PAHs are the dominant components in farmland soil and 3- and 4-ring PAHs dominate the runoff. Comparisons of the PAH pairs and enrichment ratios showed that acenaphthylene, acenaphthene, benzo[a]anthracene, chrysene, and fluoranthene were more easily transferred into water systems from soil than benzo[b]fluoranthene, benzo[k]fluoranthene, benzo[ghi]perylene, and indeno[123-cd]pyrene, which indicated that PAHs with low molecular weight are preferentially dissolved due to their higher solubility compared to those with high molecular weight.

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (21477138), the State Key Laboratory Environmental Chemistry and Ecotoxicology, Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences (KF2016-12), and the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2016 M602210).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Agro-Environment Protection Institute, Ministry of Agriculture, Tianjin, 300091, People’s Republic of China

    Rongguang Shi

  2. CAS Key Laboratory of Biobased Materials, Qingdao Institute of Bioenergy and Bioprocess Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Qingdao, 266101, People’s Republic of China

    Mengmeng Xu, Aifeng Liu, Yong Tian & Zongshan Zhao

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  1. Rongguang Shi
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Correspondence to Zongshan Zhao.

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ESM 1

Values of Σ16PAH, Σ7CPAH, and TEQ for the 30 soil samples; average concentrations and standard deviations of the individual PAHs, Σ16PAH, and Σ7CPAH in the soil and runoff from different vegetation types; spatial patterns of Σ7CPAHs and TEQ in the soil samples; enrichment ratios of the different PAHs in the different vegetation types. (DOCX 185 kb).

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Shi, R., Xu, M., Liu, A. et al. Characteristics of PAHs in farmland soil and rainfall runoff in Tianjin, China. Environ Monit Assess 189, 558 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10661-017-6290-y

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