2007 Volume 56 Issue 12 Pages 1177-1181
The discovery of an illegal dumping waste at the boundary between Aomori and Iwate prefectures has led to fear that the water leaching from the waste could be contaminated, and will pollute the downstream branches of the Mabechi river, which is the main source for water distributed to the inhabitants along the river. To clarify this, we monitored the concentrations of arsenic, selenium, cadmium and lead in the streams around the site using an ICP-MS method. These inorganic elements are all trace and toxic elements with standard values of 0.01 mg L−1, above which environmental water is considered to be polluted. The concentrations of these four elements in the streams around the dumping site neither exceeded the standard values nor showed any tendency to increase over the monitoring term. The selenium concentrations in at a site downstream from the plant were, however, always greater than those measured in other sampling sites.
