How Does the Soil Get Contaminated?

While searching on WorldCat on how soil can get contaminated, I found an article that goes into details on how soil pollution can occur. Due to geologic and anthropogenic activities, such as mining, burning fossil fuels, using phosphate-containing fertilizers, producing batteries (Lead), sewage sludge, and municipal waste disposal. The concentration of the heavy metals, which are already present in the soil, will increase to where they become harmful to both plants and animals.

Heavy metals tend to be ductile, malleable, and conductive. Thus, plants growing on soils with high concentrations of these metals will show a reduction in growth, performance, and yield. Therefore, these soils are treated through a special method called Bioremediation, which uses microorganisms and plants to clean up the polluted soil.

I was kind of surprised to find out how soil and air pollution can be quite related in some ways. For examples, not only that mining and burning fossil fuels cause air pollution but soil pollution as well. I'm starting to get curious on how might the other types of pollution that I still haven't researched yet are related to each others.

I also never realized that the things we use in our normal life, such batteries or the food we eat, could be polluting the environment when they're being produced.  

• Are there any ways to keep producing batteries without having to pollute the soil with Lead?
• How does the phosphate-containing fertilizers differ from any normal fertilizer?
• Is there an important role that phosphate plays in plant growth?

http://0-link.springer.com.skyline.ucdenver.edu/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4020-8257-3_2