For much of the last century, many cities across the United States and Canada burned their trash and waste in municipal incinerators. Most of these facilities were closed by the early 1970s due to concerns about the pollution they added to the air, but a new Duke University study finds that their legacy of contamination could live on in urban soils.
parks and playgrounds built on the site of a former waste incinerator can still have greatly elevated levels of lead in their surface soils many decades after the incinerator was closed," said Daniel D. Richter, professor of soils at Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment, who co-led the research.
Samples collected from Walltown Park mostly contained low lead levels,"but about 10% were concerning and a few were very high," Richter noted. The sharp differences in lead levels between the three parks underscores the need for increased monitoring, he stressed. By analyzing historic surveys of municipal waste management, the Duke team found that about half of all cities surveyed in the U.S. and Canada incinerated solid waste between the 1930s and 1950s.
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