BCR-483 - Extractable trace elements in sewage sludge amended soil

The material was collected from Great Billings Sewage farm (Northampton) in 1991. Some  300 kg of field-moist soil was collected by multiple sampling to a depth of 10 cm and bulked  into polyethylene bags for transport to the Macaulay Land Use Research Institute (Aberdeen,  UK). The whole soil was air-dried at 30 oc for 3 weeks on paper-lined aluminium trays.  The dried material was then gently rolled with a wooden roller to break up large aggregates,  sieved through a 2 mm round-hole sieve and stored in tightly-sealed polyethylene bags. The  soil sample was thoroughly mixed and homogenised by rolling on a clean polyethylene sheet  for 3 days with occasional mixing by hand. The whole sample was then gently poured on to  a clean polyethelene sheet, mixed, and coned and quartered by hand. The initial sample,  nominally 150 kg of air-dry ( < 2 mm) soil was split by coning and quartering, bulking  opposite quarters to form the half samples, and setting one half sample aside. The remaining  half sample was again coned and quartered. The coning and quartering procedure continued  (6 cycles) until the half-sample weight was approximately 2 kg. From opposite quarters of  this half-sample 20 subsamples were taken alternately by nylon spatula into pre-cleaned  brown glass bottles (capped by polyethylene screwcaps), each containing approx. 70 g. A  total of 1280 bottles were obtained and 128 bottles (2 from each final half-sample) were set  aside for homogeneity and stability testing  

keywords: environmental materials , soil/sediment ,  biosolids , trace elements , heavy metals , fractionation analysis