Tracing Soil Pollution Sources through Forensic Geochemistry

Summary The main objective of this work is to identify sources and patterns of organic and inorganic pollutants along soils of a heavily industrialized town. To this scope, 15 samples from soils in the town and its surroundings were collected. All samples were meshed (< 2 mm), dried and milled (<100 µm) prior being analysed, They were subjected to aqua regia digestion and analysed by means of inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) for PTEs quantification, whereas aliquots were extracted and then injected in a gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC-MS) device to assess total petroleum hydrocarbons (TPH), PAHs and BTEX. Tools for environmental assessment included uni- and multi-variate statistics, statistical interpolations and molecular diagnostic ratios for PAHs.