Acta Mechanica Slovaca 2016, 20(3):38-48 | DOI: 10.21496/ams.2016.022

Agricultural Soil Contamination by Heavy Metals in Slovakia

Ružena Králiková^1,*, Miroslav Badida¹, Miriam Andrejiová², Tomáš Konkoly³

¹ Department of Process and Environmental Engineering, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Technical University in Košice

² Department of Applied Mathematics and Informatics, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Technical University in Košice

Worsened condition of living environment with a diverse degree of devastation in individual regions contributes negatively to a state of health of population and to a general ecosystem quality. Land presents a crucial natural resource and at the same time, an economic and eco-social potential of a country. Soil pollution is one of the major environmental problems. The presence of contaminants in soil environment has a considerable impact on land resources and can result in high values of exposure for people living in the vicinity of a contaminated site. Therefore, the evaluation of hazardous elements of soil pollution is one of the most important tools for overall assessment of the contaminated area. In addition to the properties and nature of land, also an actual attitude and approach of society to the problems of land protection influence significantly overall condition and development of land. For a remediation determination, additional information about utilisation and protection of land, a type and scope of agricultural land contamination is needed in connection to a spatial layout. It is possible to achieve a reduction of transport of pollutants into a food chain and crops by application of remediation methods for decontamination of specific pollutants from lands exposed to an anthropogenic pollution.
By this reason, hazardous contaminants, based on which a layout of agricultural land was formed according to overall degree of its contamination, were the object of the research in this paper. Within the agricultural land contamination, elements As, Cd, Cr, Cu, Ni, Pb and Zn were assessed as hazardous ones taking percentage of contaminated soil into account in analysed samples from 63 districts, in order to obtain results about overall condition of the area contamination of agricultural land in Slovakia. The mutual dependence of individual monitored hazardous elements in sampling depth of 0 - 10 cm and 35 - 45 cm was determined. Within the research of the area contamination of agricultural land in the Slovak Republic, the multidimensional statistical methods and method of multiple comparisons were used. The analysis of monitoring of agricultural land contamination by heavy metals shows that regosols have the lowest content of almost all hazardous substances. On the contrary, agricultural land with higher degree of contamination by heavy metals occurs in various Slovak regions depending on a land type as well as a result of non-ecologic management in the past, e.g. due to application of fertilisers and pesticides and a nature of anthropogenic pollution, especially natural raw materials extraction, surrounding industry, transportation and so on.

Keywords: monitoring, contamination, agricultural soil, heavy metals, pollution

Published: October 31, 2016  Show citation