Lead and Chromium Creeping into Residential Areas: Silent Contamination of Domestic Soil (February 2004)

Lead and Chromium Creeping into Residential Areas: Silent Contamination of Domestic Soil (February 2004)
In the early 2000s, Japan's Soil Contamination Countermeasures Law (enacted in 2003) and other basic environmental laws and chemical substance management policy frameworks were gradually being developed.

However, these systems mainly targeted former factory sites and industrial sites, leaving "places of daily life" such as yards and vacant lots in ordinary residential areas as a blind spot.

In this context, the results of a soil survey conducted on 134 residential yards and residential lands, published in 2004, were received with quiet shock.

The results showed that 10% of the sites had high levels of lead, 14% had high levels of chromium, and 40% of the sites had high levels of copper.

Many of these toxic metals are believed to have originated in soil from former factory sites and landfill sites built before the homes were built.

Especially in urban areas where land development proceeded rapidly from the period of high economic growth after World War II to the bubble period, there were many places where land was converted to residential land with ambiguous past use histories.

Lead and chromium are widely used in paints, antiseptics, smoke emissions, electroplating, etc., and have the property of remaining in soil for a long time.

These substances, which are not visible from the outside and are not easily recognized in daily life, may pose a health risk through the food chain via vegetable gardens and oral intake by children tinkering in the soil.

The depth of the problem lies in the fact that they are detected in the "home.

This is no longer a factory problem, but environmental pollution that has entered the space of daily life, and a change in public awareness and the dissemination of knowledge about soil contamination on a daily basis, beyond the framework of the legal system and local government, are required to address this problem.

This survey revealed the existence of "silent pollution" that had been progressing in unseen places.

The soil in a beautifully landscaped garden, the memory of lead and chromium lying deep within.

It was a symbolic moment in time when the environmental administration had to face an unexplored frontier.