Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Trace Elements in Medicine and Biology journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jtemb Toxicology Soil and indoor dust as environmental media of human exposure to As, Cd, Cu, and Pb near a copper smelter in central Chile Maite Berasaluce a , Pedro Mondaca a , Marta Schuhmacher b , Manuel Bravo c , Sébastien Sauvé d , Claudia Navarro-Villarroel e , Elvira A. Dovletyarova f , Alexander Neaman a, ⁎ a Escuela de Agronomía, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Quillota, Chile b Laboratory, Department d’Enginyeria Quimica, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain c Instituto de Química, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Valparaíso, Chile d Department of Chemistry, University of Montreal, Quebec, Canada e Instituto de Estadística, Universidad de Valparaíso, Valparaíso, Chile f Department of Landscape Design and Sustainable Ecosystems, RUDN University, Moscow, Russia ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Non-carcinogenic risk Carcinogenic risk Human health Ventanas smelter House dust Soil ABSTRACT In the present study, we assessed the non-carcinogenic and carcinogenic human health risk due to exposure to trace elements in soil and indoor dust in Puchuncaví valley. We also determined the associations between trace element concentration in hair/toenails and the estimated chronic daily intake of trace elements in soil and indoor dust. We found statistically significant association between the trace element concentration in hair/ toenails and the estimated chronic daily intake of soil and indoor dust. Indoor dust was more important than soil in terms of human exposure to trace elements in Puchuncaví, due to the high concentration of trace elements on this environmental media and long periods of time that the population spends at their households. With regards to non-carcinogenic risk, we found that there was no health risk associated to soil and indoor dust exposure in the Puchuncaví valley, because none of the hazard quotient values surpassed 1.0. However, carcinogenic risk due to arsenic exposure was above the threshold value of 1.0E-04 in the population of young children (from 1 to 5 years old) in all studied areas, including the control, and in the population of children (from 6 to < 18 years old) in the exposed area. Such risk values are classified as unacceptable (US EPA, 2001), requiring some target intervention from the Chilean government. 1. Introduction 1.1. Characterization of human health risk due to exposure to trace elements The Puchuncaví valley in the coastal area of central Chile has been exposed to massive atmospheric contamination with sulfur dioxide and trace elements-rich particulate matter due to emissions from the Ventanas copper smelter. Since its opening in 1964 and until appear- ance of the first environmental regulations in 1991, no measures were taken in order to mitigate these emissions [1]. Despite the current en- vironmental regulations, the cumulative environmental effects of his- torical emissions are still latent in the surrounding soils. Specifically, the areas immediately surrounding the Ventanas smelter are now characterized by bare and sparsely vegetated land and by soils that are severely eroded, acidic and contaminated with elevated levels of trace elements (Cu, Zn, Pb, Cd, and As) [2]. The above-mentioned soil conditions may contribute to human ex- posure to trace elements through inhalation of wind-blown dust or di- rect ingestion of soil [3]. Several other authors also highlighted the importance of incidental ingestion of soil and house dust as an exposure route to trace elements by adults and children [4–6]. Based on these evidences, soil and house dust seem to be important environmental media of human exposure to trace elements in Puchuncaví. Likewise, there are many evidences, from several countries, that trace element contamination in mining areas can cause health damage to the local inhabitants [e.g. in Ref. 7]. Based on these arguments, we hypothesized that, in the population of Puchuncaví valley, exposure to trace elements would represent a risk to human health. For exposure assessment, we need to establish a method to estimate the “chronic daily intake” index, which refers to the average quantity of trace element intake by multiple pathways, in a certain population, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtemb.2019.04.006 Received 23 October 2018; Received in revised form 25 March 2019; Accepted 15 April 2019 ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail address: alexander.neaman@pucv.cl (A. Neaman). Journal of Trace Elements in Medicine and Biology 54 (2019) 156–162 0946-672X/ © 2019 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved. T