METAL CONCENTRATIONS OF PAINT EFFLUENT, METAL DUMP SITE SOIL AND ASSOCIATED NICOTIANA TABACUM LEAVES FROM A CROWN CAPS INDUSTRY

By way of explanation, environmental pollution is the contamination of air, water, land and food in a way that will result to real or potential harm or threat to human health and damage to non-human nature without any justification. It is, therefore, very imperative for us to know the sources of these pollutants/contaminants to our environments. Industrial effluents, wastes and emissions, contain toxic and hazardous substances most of which can be detrimental to human health 1 . These include heavy metals such as Pb, Cd, Hg, Co, etc. and toxic organic chemicals. For instance, there was the case of Minamata disease in Japan in the 1960's caused by mercury poisoning of consumers of fish from Minamata Bay, Japan 2 , which had received untreated effluINTRODUCTION Industrialization is vital to nation's socioeconomic development as well as its political stature in the international committee of nations. It provides ready employment opportunities for a good percentage of the population in medium to highly developed economics. Although industrialization is inevitable, various devastating ecological and human disasters which have continuously occurred over the last three decades or so implicate industries as major contributors to environmental degradation and pollution problems of various magnitudes. Rapid industrial development in developed and developing countries has increased hazardous wastes generation several fold. The levels of minor metals: Sn, Mn, Zn, Cu, Cr, Cd, Pb, Fe, As, Ti, Al and major metals: Na, K, Ca and Mg were determined in the paint effluent, metal dump site and the associated leaves of Nicotiana tabacum plant from a Crown caps industry. Levels of Al, Mg, Na, K, As, Cr, Cd, Ti and Ca were all correspondingly higher in the N. tabacum leaves than the soil, this could be due to the metal bioaccumulation of the metals in the leaves. With the exception of As (with 231.5 ppm) all the values in the plant and the dump site were higher than the values in the paint effluent. The correlation coefficient between the metal dump and tobacco leaves was significantly, high (rXy = 0.68) with a low index of forecasting efficiency (26.7%). Since all the samples were high in the metals determined (particularly the trace metals) the industrial envi-. ronment was polluted and would need constant monitoring.