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Beneath the Surface: Unmasking the Global Crisis of Soil Pollution
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This review examines soil pollution as a global crisis driven by industrial emissions, intensive agriculture, and poor waste management, covering how heavy metals, pesticides, microplastics, and emerging contaminants accumulate in soils, degrade microbial communities, reduce crop yields, and enter the food chain.
Soil pollution is an escalating global crisis with profound implications for environmental health, agricultural productivity, and food security. Driven by industrial emissions, intensive agriculture, urbanization, and poor waste management, pollutants such as heavy metals, pesticides, microplastics, and emerging contaminants persist in the soil, disrupt its biological functions, and enter the food chain. These toxicants degrade soil microbial communities, reduce crop yields, and impair biodiversity and ecosystem resilience. The impacts extend beyond the farm, contributing to climate change and posing chronic risks to human health through bioaccumulation and biomagnification. Despite its critical importance, soil pollution remains under-monitored, and remediation is often constrained by technical, financial, and institutional challenges. This review synthesizes the sources, classifications, pathways, and ecological impacts of soil contaminants, while critically examining current remediation strategies and policy frameworks. It underscores the urgent need for integrated soil health management, robust legal regulations, enhanced public awareness, and innovative sustainable practices to restore and protect this vital resource.
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Asia’s soil contamination crisis: causes, consequences, and sustainable solutions: a comprehensive review
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This review addresses Asia's soil contamination crisis, examining how rapid urbanization, intensive agriculture, and poor waste management have created widespread heavy metal and microplastic soil pollution threatening food security, biodiversity, and human health across the continent.
Hazardous Health Impacts of Soil Pollution
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Researchers review how soil contamination from heavy metals, xenobiotics, microplastics, and pathogens threatens human health through crop uptake, food-chain transfer, and groundwater infiltration, tracing the primary drivers to intensifying agricultural chemical use and expanding human activity.
Soil Contamination, Risk Assessment, and Remediation
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This review covers soil contamination from various sources including agrochemicals, waste materials, and emerging pollutants like microplastics, along with methods for risk assessment and remediation. Researchers examined how human activities such as farming, waste disposal, and industrial practices contribute to soil pollution and disrupt soil fertility. The study emphasizes the need for comprehensive risk assessment frameworks that account for the complex interactions between traditional and emerging soil contaminants.
Agricultural Environmental Pollution, Risk Assessment, and Control
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This book chapter reviews the growing burden of agricultural environmental pollution — from pesticide residues to microplastics and heavy metals — and evaluates risk assessment frameworks and control strategies for protecting soil health and food safety.
Mechanistic insights into how soil-borne contaminants impair plant physiology and agricultural output
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This review paper pulls together existing research showing how pollutants like microplastics, heavy metals, and overused pesticides are damaging soil health, poisoning the microbes that keep soil fertile, and leaving harmful residues in our crops. This matters because it means the food supply chain is being squeezed from multiple angles, lower harvests, higher farming costs, and contaminated produce that can be rejected for sale, while these same soil pollutants may end up on our plates and in our environment long-term.
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When a large batch of papers lands in the Atlas, we read through it and send a short write-up of what stood out.