Soil, an important environmental compartment, is largely affected daily by anthropogenic activities such as industries, traffic and waste disposal. These activities can bring to the soils large quantities of several contaminants and consequently they can easily enter the food chain and the trophic scale of ecosystems via plants and animals.
This type of organic pollutants can persist for long times in the environment, being susceptible to transport for long distances, then they can easily reach a large geographic area and be widely dispersed.
It is of an extreme importance to assess the environmental and human health risk pose by this problem. In this work, an evaluation and a comparison study will be done through bioavailability tests and ecotoxicological bioassays with plants and invertebrates in order to assess the real risk inherent to the presence of such pollutants in soils of an important industrial area: Estarreja (Portugal) as well as in the“casiers Girardon” of Rhône river (France). These constructions were responsible for significant changes in the sedimentation processes in the river banks especially during overflow episodes. Sediment deposition can lead also to several ecosystem and health risks once some inorganic and organic pollutants can be associated to these sediments.