Leaching of Heavy Metals from Contaminated Soils using Inductively Coupled Plasma Optical Emission Spectrometer (ICP-OES) and Atomic Absorption Spectrometer (AAS)

The clean-up of soils contaminated with heavy metals is one of the most difficult tasks for environmental engineering. Heavy metals are highly persistent in soil and a number of techniques have been developed that aim to remove heavy metals from contaminated soil. A method has been adopted to evaluate dynamic leaching of metal contaminants from industrial soil samples obtained from textile industrial sites in Lahore, Pakistan. In the extraction procedures employed five different leaching liquors were used: 0.01M CaCl , 1 M HNO , a 1:1 mixture of 0.1M HCl and 0.1M NaCl, 0.01M 2 3 EDTA and pH controlled 0.5M acetic acid. The qualitative and quantitative analyses were carried out by Atomic Absorption Spectroscopy (AAS) and Inductively Coupled Plasma-Optical Emission Spectrometer (ICP-OES). The results indicate that Cu, Zn, Cd, Ni, Pb, Fe and As were extracted in the soil samples in varying concentration when using the different leach liquors. The predominant metals which were leached were As 78.7ng/ml in 0.01M EDTA; Zn 1.81 μg/ml and Fe 898.96 μg/ml in HNO . 3