Abstract
Despite all the economic benefits of cement production, heavy metals as the byproduct of the cement manufacturing process can be serious threats to the environment and human health. In southwest Iran, the Shiraz cement factory has been in operation since 1979. To date, no biomonitoring effort has been completed to study the extent of heavy metals pollution in the region. Therefore, we began measuring the concentration of heavy metals accumulated in the leaves of four domestic plant species, i.e., Platanus occidentalis L. (sycamore), Salix babylonica (willow), Acer (maple), and Eucalyptus (myrtle). The samples were collected along the radial distances of 1.0–3.0 km from the factory during the spring and summer of 2014. We found that the concentrations of lead (Pb), chromium (Cr), copper (Cu), zinc (Zn), manganese (Mn), and cadmium (Cd) in the plant leaves exceeded the permissible limits for heavy metals. The analysis indicated that the concentrations of heavy metals increased from spring to summer and decreased with distance from the factory. Despite Pb and Cr, the concentrations of Mn, Cu, Zn, and Cd indicated strong dependencies with changes in precipitation, wind speed and direction, temperature, and evapotranspiration. Although Platanus occidentalis L. (sycamore) and Eucalyptus (myrtle) indicated the highest heavy metals accumulation rates compared to Salix babylonica (willow) and Acer (maple), the efficiency of plants to absorb pollution was highly dependent on dominant wind direction and distance from the factory. In dominant wind directions of northwest and west, the absorption rate was not as high as the nondominant wind directions and heavy metals most likely traveled farther than 3.0 km. The current investigation highlights the advantages of biomonitoring deciduous forests and studying the long-term bioaccumulation of heavy metals during one-year growth. Since the exposure time and absorption conditions among similar plant species were constant, the changes in heavy metals concentrations reflected the influence of distance and wind direction. This helps environmental managers to develop sustainable measures for controlling heavy metals pollution in industrial regions by planting certain tree species but within an appropriate distance and direction from the pollution source.
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Data availability
The data that support the findings of this study are not openly available since the authors personally funded this research effort. The data will be available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request on a secure online data storage platform.
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Javanmardi, E., Javanmardi, M. & Berton, R. Biomonitoring efforts to evaluate the extent of heavy metals pollution induced by cement industry in Shiraz, Iran. Int. J. Environ. Sci. Technol. 19, 11711–11728 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13762-022-04307-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13762-022-04307-4