Soil Pollutants of Emerging Concern and Their One Health Implications

The continuous increase in the Global South population instinctively requires the need for the establishment of more industries to produce goods and services to meet the growing human needs. These production processes, in turn, result in the release of emerging contaminants into environmental matrices particularly into soil systems of the region. These emerging contaminants ranged from antibiotics, microplastics, nanoplastics, polyaromatic hydrocarbons, pharmaceutical and personal care products, pesticides, engineered nanoparticles, and surfactants, and they are all of emerging concern. They are known to have hazardous effects on soil, soil-related biodiversity, and human health. They reduce soil quality and often lead to poor seed germination and crop yield, affect the uptake by plants and farm animals, and alter soil structure, metabolic processes, and enzyme activities of soil microorganisms. In humans, they bioaccumulate within the food chain through the intake of polluted agricultural foodstuffs and impair human development and disrupt reproductive processes as well as normal hormonal, neurological, and immune system functioning. The contaminants of emerging concerns can be detected through microscopic, chromatographic, and spectroscopic methods. In this chapter, these emerging soil contaminants are discussed, and some mitigation strategies such as source reduction, soil amendment, bioremediation techniques, and implementation of laws by governments are proposed to control their release and spread.