Soil pollution is one of the nine soil degradation processes. The European Union does not have a common soil protection law, but individual member states have their own national soil quality standards, which include also contents of potentially toxic metals (PTM). In general, there are three standard values for the evaluation of soil pollution: (i) background/precaution, (ii) warning/trigger and (iii) critical/action value, which differ among countries in the PTM contents and in the (non-) land use consideration. Soil characteristics, which affect the mobility and bioavailability in soil are also important in the evaluation of soil pollution in addition to land use. In the thesis we compared the legislation of selected European countries: Slovenia, Switzerland, Germany, the Netherland and Sweden. The differences in the legislations between selected countries were shown on the example of the Meža Valley. Data of lead, zinc and cadmium contents in soils of the Meža valley, obtained from publicly accessible databases, were compared to the normative values of selected EU countries. We find out that Sweden has the most stringent legislation, it has the lowest PTM normative values, followed by Slovenia and the Neterlands. The highest critical values have Germany and the Switzerland, but their legislation considers the highest number of different land uses at the determining of the level of soil pollution. Germany has the normative values for six different types of land use (play ground, residential, park, industrial, gardens and agriculture, greenland), Switzerland three (agricultural, garden, play ground) and the Netherlands two (residential and industrial). Sweden has three PTM normative values according to the sensitivity of land use (sensitive, less sensitive and less sensitive use without groundwater protection), just Slovenia does not take land use into account for soil pollution assessment.
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