[Migration and transformation of anthropogenic platinum group elements in environment: a review]

Anthropogenic platinum group elements (PGEs) are widely applied in vehicle exhaust catalytic converters (VECs), industrial catalysts, and pharmaceutics, making the PGEs, especially Pt, Pd, and Rh, become the newly environmental pollutants in some fields. Given the positive correlations between the Pt/Pd and Pt/Rh ratios in various environmental samples and the active components of VECs, the VECs containing PGEs as catalysts are regarded as the primary source of PGEs pollution. Sufficient reports indicated that in the past three decades, there was a significant increase of PGEs concentrations in diverse environmental matrices like airborne particulate matters, aquatic ecosystem components (e.g., river water, rain water, groundwater, seawater, and sediments), soils, road dusts, and organisms. It was generally assumed that anthropogenic PGEs behave in inert manner, and the health risks associated with the environmental exposures to PGEs are minimal. However, the recent studies on PGEs toxicity and environmental bioavailability indicated that once entering environment, anthropogenic PGEs might easily be mobilized and transformed into more toxic forms under the actions of various biogeochemical processes, and thereby, enhanced their bioavailability and posed potential health risks to human beings through food chain. This paper summarized the research results about the sources, distribution, and biogeochemical behaviors of PGEs in various environmental media, and it was considered that to establish the standards of PGEs for human health risks, to develop standard substances of PGEs for environmental measurements, to study the PGEs in the sediments of marginal seas, and to assess the toxicity of PGEs to marine mollusks, the present contamination status of PGEs in foods, and the risks of PGEs to human health would be the hot research topics in the future.