How to remove toxic metal-rich road dust from urban environments? A new eco-friendlyremediation approach.

Abstract

Ambient particulate matter pollution, which can be accumulated on urban roads, is one of the global modern society challenges (WHO, 2016). This road dust is constituted by different fractions of geogenic and anthropogenic particles, which commonly act as a potentially toxic elements (PTEs) temporary storage. In low-income countries, long-term exposure to traffic-generated dust was estimated to cause every year 1.5 to 2 million premature deaths, mostly children and women. In high- and middle-income countries, there is also an increasing awareness and concern of the potential adverse impacts of dust on health (Navarro-Ciurana et al., 2023). The current methods applied to reduce road dust are based on: i) their recovery by sweep cleaning and subsequent accumulation in wastelands, increasing the local pollution in these areas, and ii) their street elimination with water cleaning, which produce an increase of dissolved metals on urban runoff and residual waters. Consequently, remediation tools to efficiently eliminate the road dust’s PTEs from the environment are urgently needed. Vitrification of polluted soils has been applied as an in- and ex-situ remediation procedure, where they are used as raw material in the glass manufacture (Roca et al., 2021). However, this promising technique has not yet been applied to road dust. We present here for the first time the application of the vitrification technique of heavy metal-polluted roadside dust as an eco-friendly remediation solution. This study is based on road dust from Barcelona Province (Badalona city) to illustrate their potential as a new raw material for glass production. This could be an eco-friendly solution to attenuating the environmental pollution problem and prejudicial health impacts in a sustainable circular economy context, as well as to obtain an economic benefit.