Soil Heavy Metals Pollution Assessment in the Suburb of Zhengzhou City

To investigate the influences of urbanization process on soil environment, the study was conducted in the suburb of Zhengzhou city. The concentrations of heavy metals Cd, Hg, Pb, As and Cr in the topsoils were analysis, and the soil environmental quality on the base of the environmental background value criteria were evaluated by single factor index and Nemerow multi-factor index method, respectively. Furthermore, the spatial variability of soil pollution in terms of heavy metals was researched with the Kriging interpolation method. The results indicate that the average contents of heavy metals(Cr and Pb) in the soil exceed the background values, in which, the concentrations of Cr was higher than background value, suggesting that Cr might be considered as a dominant element causing soil heavy metal pollution in the study area; Pb was in slightly polluted, while other heavy metals were not in polluted states; and the integrated contamination index of all sample have exceed 1, being in polluted grades; Regional differences of index of soil heavy metal were very notable.