ORIGINAL ARTICLE Empirical estimation of pollution load and contamination levels of phthalate esters in agricultural soils from plastic film mulching in China Yongshan Chen • Chunfa Wu • Haibo Zhang • Qiaoying Lin • Youwei Hong • Yongming Luo Received: 8 December 2011 / Accepted: 7 November 2012 / Published online: 1 December 2012 Ó Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012 Abstract Pollution load and contamination levels of phthalate esters (PAEs) in agricultural soils throughout China were studied in this work. The usage amount and residual rates of plastic film were the main factors explaining the variation among regions and leading to higher pollution load and contamination levels in agricul- tural big provinces. However, higher pollution loads and contamination levels frequently occurred under non-recy- cling than recycling scenarios during calculation. Extre- mely high loads (more than 10 kg/ha/year) of PAEs were estimated in five areas including Beijing city, Tibet, Lia- oning Province, Jilin Province and Fujian Province and the high contamination levels in agricultural soil were pre- sented in these places with more than 4.0 mg/kg under non- recycling scenarios. The predicted concentrations of PAEs in soils exceed the target value for soils from Netherlands (RPAEs = 0.1 mg/kg), indicating very high contamination of most Chinese agricultural soils. Significant differences in estimation results after plastic film utilization suggest that decreasing plastic film residue after application is an effective measure to control PAE pollution in soils. How- ever, the comparison between contamination levels of PAEs estimated by the model and the previous detections of PAEs pollution levels in agricultural soils showed that there were presented wide range of PAE sources indicated to agricultural soils. Keywords Phthalate esters  Plastic film mulching  Pollution load  Contamination levels  Empirical estimation  Scenario Introduction Phthalate esters (phthalic acid esters, PAEs) are common plasticizers used to increase the flexibility, extensibility and ease of processing (workability) of polyvinyl chloride (PVC), with a constituent up to 50 % of the total weight of PVC plastics (van Wezel et al. 2000). PAEs are not irre- versibly bound to the polymer matrix, but present in the PVC as a freely mobile and leachable phase, resulting in migrating from the plastic to the external environment under certain conditions (Balafas et al. 1999; Go ´mez-Hens and Aguilar-Caballos 2003; Colombani et al. 2009). The yearly production of PVC is approximately 20 million tons, and it was estimated that the PVC waste amounts were up to 5.4 million tons in 2010 and a 40 % rise of that waste is likely to occur in 2020 (Teil et al. 2006). There- fore, the environmental contamination levels will be enhanced because of the worldwide utilization of PAEs in plastic industry. At the present time, ubiquitous and serious contamination of PAEs in environmental matrices such as soil, water and air, has been reported in numerous studies (Mayer et al. 1972; Staples et al. 1997; Peijnenburg and Struijs 2006; Teil et al. 2006; Zeng et al. 2008). After entering the environment, PAEs are redistrib- uted among solid, aqueous and gas phases. Sorption, Y. Chen  Q. Lin  Y. Hong Key Laboratory of Urban Environment and Health, Institute of Urban Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xiamen, People’s Republic of China e-mail: yshchen421@163.com C. Wu Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing, People’s Republic of China H. Zhang  Y. Luo (&) Yantai Institute of Coastal Zone Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Yantai, People’s Republic of China e-mail: ymluo@yic.ac.cn 123 Environ Earth Sci (2013) 70:239–247 DOI 10.1007/s12665-012-2119-8