Assessment of Heavy Metal Concentrations in the Arable Soils near Industrial Complexes in Gangwon, Chungnam, Jeonnam, and Gyeongnam Provinces of South Korea

Received: October 29, 2019 Revised: November 19, 2019 Accepted: November 27, 2019 ORCID Tae-Gu Lee https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3115-7516 Mijin Chae https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0153-9919 Heavy metal (HM) pollution in agricultural lands and waters, which is rapidly increasing due to social and industrial activities, such as mining and smelting. Moreover, HM contamination causes serious environmental problems and adversely influences on the safety of agricultural production. This study established the concentrations of HM on the arable lands near industrial complexes in Gangwon (GW), Chungnam (CN), Jeonnam (JN), and Gyeongnam (GN) in South Korea. Soil samples were collected and established from 600 sites of agricultural lands nearby 60 industrial complexes in the selected provinces. Eight HMs (Cd, Cu, Pb, Zn, Ni, Cr, As and Zn) were analyzed to compare degrees of the HM pollution using standard analytical methods. The average total concentration of all HMs from samples of the analyzed soils did not exceed the warning criteria as suggested by the Soil Environmental Conservation Law of Korea. The concentration of Cd, Cu, Pb, Zn, Ni, As and Hg were mostly distributed below one half concentration of warning criteria, except for the Cr and Hg. Particularly, 99.2% of Hg concentrations among the assessed samples distributed below one-twentieth values of the warning criteria. Contamination degree () of GW and GN provinces were moderate degree, CN and JN province were low degree contamination. Four provinces were classified as “uncontaminated” by  (Pollution index).