Multivariate analysis of heavy metal pollution in street dusts of Xianyang city, NW China
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Multivariate analysis of heavy metal pollution in street dusts of Xianyang city, NW China Xingmin Shi • Lingxia Chen • Jianhui Wang
Received: 5 January 2012 / Accepted: 26 September 2012 / Published online: 10 October 2012 Ó Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012
Abstract Urban street dust is one of important indicators of the status of urban environmental pollution. There are many studies in capital cities, but little attention has been paid to this kind of study in medium cities, especially in China. The dust samples were collected in the district of traffic crossroads in Xianyang city, Shaanxi Province. Pb, Cd, Cu, Ni, Zn, Cr and Mn concentrations were determined by using atomic absorption spectrometry. The results indicate that street dusts in Xianyang city have elevated metal concentrations as a whole in comparison with Shaanxi Province soil, except for Mn. The content of heavy metals was comparable to those in capital cities. Correlation coefficient analysis, principal component analysis and cluster analysis were used and three main sources were identified; Mn comes mainly from soil sources; Cu, Zn and Ni are mainly derived from industrial sources combined with traffic sources; Pb, Cr and Cd have traffic sources. Heavy metal enrichment factors were calculated, which can reflect human influence degree of street dusts. Keywords Xianyang city Heavy metals Street dust Principal component analysis X. Shi (&) College of Tourism and Environment, Shaanxi Normal University, Xi’an 710062, China e-mail: [email protected] L. Chen College of Tourism and Resource Environment, Xianyang Normal University, Xianyang 712000, Shaanxi, China e-mail: [email protected] J. Wang College of Chemical Science, Xianyang Normal University, Xianyang 712000, Shaanxi, China e-mail: [email protected]
Introduction Street dusts are the particulates that are deposited on the road, and they are a major source of pollution in the urban environment. Usually street dusts are very harmful to the human body, because the dusts usually carry toxic heavy metals (AIRajhi et al. 1996). The dusts that concentrate heavy metals can possibly enter the human body through the respiratory tract, which can lead to chronic poisoning because of the accumulation of heavy metals. The street dusts seriously endanger the health of urban populations, especially affecting children’s physical intelligence (Harrison and Yin 2000). Many studies about street dusts have risen in the last decades. Day et al. (1975) published the papers ‘‘Lead in urban street dust’’ and first proposed the terminology of urban street dust. Afterward many countries have studied heavy metals in street dusts, especially in developed economies and densely population cities (Charlesworth and Lees 1999; Li et al. 2001; Rasmussen et al. 2001). Charlesworth et al. (2003) found that, in general, the content of heavy metal in street dust is mainly affected by human activities. There are also many researches on street dusts in China (Zhou et al. 2008; Miao et al. 2012). In C
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