Legacies of Pre-1960s Municipal Waste Incineration in the Pb of City Soils.

A 1937 street map of Durham, North Carolina, located four city-run waste incinerators that we recognized to be sites of contemporary city parks. We obtained city permission to sample three park's soils, developed a sampling design for geospatial mapping of hypothetical incinerator-ash contamination of park soils, and queried online Durham newspapers to understand histories of incinerator operations, ash disposal, and incinerator-to-park conversions. In 2021-2022, seven decades after parks were created, two parks had soil-Pb > 400 mgPb/kg, EPA's threshold for safe soil in play areas. At Walltown Park, six of 97 surface samples ranged from 416 to 1338 mg Pb/kg within meters of a basketball court and a park path. East Durham Park had a hectare-sized area where 12 samples averaged 1294 mgPb/kg (median 1335 mg/kg). Engineering surveys of United States and Canadian cities in 1941 and 1958 suggest that half incinerated solid wastes. Many records describe how incinerator ash was dumped with little regard for health or environmental hazards. Legacy soil contaminations of incinerator ash can be identified, as we have done in Durham, from historical records of city-waste incinerator operations, online access to newspaper archives that describe incinerator-to-park conversions, and a XRF to screen for soil-Pb contamination.

Duke Scholars

Author Daniel D. Richter Earth and Climate Sciences