Overview
Supply-chain pages describe the paths by which heavy metals enter the food system, and which sources put them there. Coverage includes soil geochemistry and agricultural uptake; the aquatic pathway by which metals reach fish, shellfish, and seaweed; atmospheric deposition from smelting, mining, shipping, traffic, and aviation; irrigation water, sewage sludge, biosolids, and fertilisers as anthropogenic inputs to cropland; food-contact equipment and packaging; and the source-attribution evidence that apportions an ambient burden among the industries that created it. Pages link to the downstream ingredients and products affected, and to the regulations governing inputs. The load-bearing rule across every page in this section is that an upstream concentration, in soil, water, sediment, air, or an emission inventory, is never a food concentration and is never promoted into the measured food-occurrence record or the certification thresholds.
Pathway hubs
- Soil-to-plant transfer of heavy metals
- Aquatic bioaccumulation of heavy metals
- Atmospheric deposition of heavy metals
- Irrigation water and soil amendments as anthropogenic inputs to cropland
Source attribution
Element- and material-specific
Update history
The five most recent substantive edits to this page, classified major (evidence or structure moved), correction (a published value or statement was wrong and has been fixed), or minor (narrative rewritten without changing the underlying evidence). Each description is derived from what the edit did to this page; the linked commit is the authoritative record, routine regeneration passes are excluded, and the full version history lives in git. When DOI minting comes online (see schema docs), each entry below will also link to a version-pinned DataCite DOI.
| Commit | Date | Change | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| a8052bb | 2026-08-09 | major | 5 sections added; narrative text revised |