Assessment of industrial contamination of agricultural soil adjacent to Sadat City, Egypt

Abstract Assessment of the environmental impact of El Sadat City, a Cairo satellite, known for its clustered enterprises, on the neighbourhood water supply El Manashi Tawfikia Canal was undertaken through soil analysis. A total of 20 agricultural soil samples were collected along the El Manashi Tawfikia Canal. Neutron activation analysis was implemented to determine heavy metal contents of such elements as As, Ba, Co, Cr, Ni, and Zn. Multivariate statistical analysis was applied to the results obtained. The metal pollution index and enrichment factor were calculated. It was shown that the content of toxic heavy metals in soil samples does not exceed the worldwide-published values, except arsenic which considerably exceeds normalized to the content of the same element in the Upper Continental Crust. The metal pollution index is high compared with the calculated ones for similar soil samples from the Nile Delta, and the enrichment factor varied from moderate to high enrichment (5 < EF > 10).