Assessment of sources and pollution state of trace and toxic elements in street dust in a metropolitan city

Street dust and urban soil samples are significant part of environmental compartments to evaluate the contamination levels in urban and industrial zones. This study was carried out to ascertain the concentrations of trace and toxic elements in Izmir street dusts collected from 20 different sites dominating by industrial (four sites), residential (seven sites) and traffic (nine sites) areas, and also to figure out the exposure of adults and children to the elemental toxicity in dust. In order to measure the total and soluble concentrations of elements, the dust samples were analyzed with ICP-MS methodology. The results indicated that concentrations of anthropogenic-based elements are homogenously spread out in whole Izmir city in a similar way to crustal-based elements. This indicates that traffic and residential heating were dominant pollutant sources throughout the city dusts. The health risk assessment showed that elemental non-carcinogenic risks are lower than limit value. However, the cancer risks exceed the acceptable level for As and Cr. According to source apportionment analysis, seven factors were defined for trace elements for all site data.