Authors:

Abigail Stacy

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About Paper:

Industry plays a prominent role in Chicago's economy, emphasized by the creation of industrial corridors to facilitate industrial activity by the City of Chicago. Over the last century, these industrial corridors have been used continually for industrial practices, like metalwork or energy production. Industry is a source of pollution, notably heavy metal pollution. As such, industrial corridors likely contain larger amounts of pollution than non-industrial areas. While some heavy metals play an important role in human health, others, like cadmium, chromium, and lead, can be extremely harmful, posing threats to residents in industrial areas. Thus far, copper, cadmium, chromium, and lead have been quantified in soil and plant samples from industrial corridors using atomic absorption spectroscopy. Notably, a distribution center in Little Village contained levels of copper, cadmium, chromium, and lead that exceeded safe levels of heavy metal content in soil. Due to the high levels of heavy metals in industrial corridors like Little Village, the effectiveness of wild carrot, or Daucus carota, as a bioindicator will be explored. Daucus carota, if deemed effective, can be analyzed for unsafe levels of heavy metals because of its ability to uptake copper, cadmium, chromium, and lead in industrial corridors. Wild carrot plants have been grown in soil exposed to various concentrations of heavy metals; the plants and their soil have been analyzed via atomic absorption spectroscopy to measure the uptake of heavy metals in the plant. Overall, this project has revealed the dangerous levels of heavy metal in Chicago industrial corridors and continues to investigate the usage of Daucus carota as a bioindicator in future pollution research.

Source:

Loyola University Chicago

Topics:

No topics listed

Co-authors:

Abigail Stacy