Human Health Risk Assessment: a Case Study of Heavy Metal Contamination of Garden Soils in Szeged

The soils of the big cities, owing to the various anthropogenic activities, can be contaminated by heavy metals. The surroundings of the roads with heavy traffic as significant metal emitter source can be contaminated by heavy metals. The hobby gardens and the vegetable gardens directly along roads can be potential risky for people since unknown amount of heavy metals can be accumulated into organization of local residents due to consumption of vegetables and fruits grown in their own garden. Most metals are well-known to have toxic characters but we have known little what extent these metals exert influence on people living directly along road with busy traffic. During our research, metal contamination has been investigated in the gardens near the roads with heavy traffic in Szeged by measuring of metal contents in soil and plants samples. Enrichment factor has been calculated with the help of control soil samples far from roads having heavily traffic. Besides determination of the metal content of soil and plant samples, soil properties basically influencing on metal mobility has been examined in order to characterize the buffering capacity of the studied soils. The health risk quotients have also been determined to evaluate human health risk of the contaminated soils.