EVALUATION OF SOIL POLLUTION DEGREE IN THE COPŞA MICĂ AREA (ROMANIA) BY MEANS OF RELATIVE INDICES.

Regardless the source, soil pollution is a daily reality resulting from anthropising the environment, especially through industrial explosion, increasing consumption and excessive urbanization. Lead, cadmium and other heavy metals provided by human activities accumulate in the soil by bioaccumulation at concentrations that become dangerously high for the biota living in or on the soil. While getting in permanent contact for a long time with the soil, the inhabitants of the polluted areas are exposed daily to the risk entailed by the toxicity of dangerous concentrations of Pb and Cd. The assessment of the pollution degree with heavy metals of the soil can be accomplished by comparing experimental values with the maximum permissible levels regulated by the regional, national or international legislation or by using relative indices such as the Global pollution index Z. Loading with Pb and Cd of some adjacent areas to the point sources of pollution is conditioned by remoteness from the source, the local orography of the land that dictates the concentration, orientation or, as the case may be, the spreading of air mass polluted with the heavy metal component [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]