Copper exposure. Copper (Cu) is abundant in the environment. Environmental Cu comes from Cu mining or processing of in industry, agriculture, and medicine (Georgopoulos et al., 2001). There were a few to 200 ng/m3 Cu in the atmosphere (Hsu et al., 2018), 13–24 mg/kg Cu in soils (Emmeline et al., 2022), and 0.004–0.01 mg/L Cu in natural water (Squitti et al., 2014). Cu production and emissions have gradually increased during the last few decades (Daehn et al., 2017).
