International Journal of Environmental Science and Development

Abstract—These experiments were carried out to analyze the content of heavy metals in 8 kinds of vegetables grown in Xigu Industrial District in Lanzhou city. The possible health risk associated with 4 metals in vegetables to local inhabitants via their consumption was assessed, based on target hazard quotients (THQ) and pollution indexes. The results showed that the measured vegetables do not contain Pb or maybe Pb content in vegetables is relatively small, it could not be measured in this experiment. For Cu elements, the most abundant content was in eggplant with a concentration of 0.067 mg/kg, then the least content was for cauliflower with a concentration of 0.015 mg/kg; for Cd elements, the most abundant content was in celery with a concentration of 0.067mg / kg, the content in cabbage was the least with a concentration of 0.023 mg/kg; and then for Zn elements, the most abundant content was in spinach with a concentration of 1.001 mg/kg, the least is pepper with a concentration of 0.274 mg/kg. Environmental health risk assessment showed that THQ values are less than 1, indicating the heavy metal content of most collected vegetables match with the requirements of safety and quality of agricultural products.

Index Terms—Health risk, heavy metals, industrial district, vegetables.

Jean Yves Uwamungu is with the Center for Agricultural Resources Research, Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shijiazhuang 050021, China (e-mail: joady9@yahoo.fr, joady9@mails.ucas.ac.cn ).
Yufeng Jiang, Anne Marie Mukundwa, Hang Sun, and Xuefei Hu are with the School of Environmental and Municipal Engineering, Lanzhou Jiaotong University, Lanzhou 730070, China (e-mail: jiangyf7712@126.com, mukie@yahoo.fr ).

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Cite: Jean Yves Uwamungu, Yufeng Jiang, Anne Marie Mukundwa, Hang Sun, and Xuefei Hu, "Heavy Metals Concentrations and Health Risk in Vegetables Grown in Xigu Industrial District in Lanzhou City," International Journal of Environmental Science and Development vol. 8, no. 8, pp. 586-590, 2017.