Soil can be contaminated with a wide variety of chemicals including petrochemicals, chlorinated hydrocarbons, pesticides, and heavy metals. Therefore, exposure to contaminated soil or eating food grown in contaminated soil, and any resultant dusts, can represent a significant potential source of adverse health risk to humans. People can be exposed by breathing contaminated dust, swallowing or touching contaminated soil, and eating food grown in contaminated soil. Children who live and play in a contaminated area can have increased exposure.

In addition, preschool-age children are more likely to be exposed because of their frequent hand-to-mouth activity, commonly referred to as mouthing, which is a normal phase of child development. Furthermore, dust from contaminated soil can be tracked into the house on shoes and can end up on indoor surfaces and toys. In addition, deliberate soil ingestion, sometimes referred to as pica, can also occur. Pica is a disorder characterized by persistent craving for, and ingestion of, non-nutritive substances. It derives its name from the Latin word for the Magpie, a bird that collects things compulsively and indiscriminately. Pica exists in all segments of the population, but is particularly prevalent among some people with developmental disabilities.

At The Sapphire Group, our experts are well versed in all aspects pertaining to the technical, regulatory, and legal challenges of contaminated soils. These skills include:

• Analytical chemistry, including basic analytical problems, techniques, and standards with soil.
• Environmental fate, including the chemistry and physics influencing the movement, binding, and partitioning of contaminants in the soil.
• Environmental modeling, including the mathematical representation of contaminant movement and its relationship to real world exposures.
• Risk assessment issues, including health effects and hazards, exposure assessment, and risk characterization of sites and remedial actions.
• Risk management or the application of risk assessment information, especially during remediation.
• Regulatory issues, especially numerical standards of cleanups (action levels, maximum concentration levels, and cleanup levels) and approaches/methodologies utilized by the regulatory community.
• Legal considerations pertaining to regulatory statutes or actions, as well as those pertaining to the private sector, such as banking and real estate transactions (i.e., Brownfields).
• Risk Communication, dealing with hostile audiences, politics, community issues including "right to know" and the general public.