Permissible and background concentrations of pollutants in environmental regulation (heavy metals and other chemical elements)

Approaches to the establishment of the limit concentrations of pollutants in Russia and abroad were considered. It was shown that the norms for the concentrations of total trace elements and heavy metals in soils used in Russia and European countries are comparable. On the basis of the analysis of cartographic data, general regularities in changes of the concentrations of some trace elements were revealed for soils of European Russia. Different computational methods were tested for establishing the background concentrations of elements in soils of different composition in different regions.