Overview
Silva and colleagues paired surface soils with carrot, beetroot, potato, cabbage, red onion and bean from three Sri Lankan growing areas and measured cadmium, lead, arsenic, copper and zinc to derive bioaccumulation factors. Table 7 gives dry-weight means in the edible parts of each crop at each location. Carrots carried the most cadmium and lead; soil-to-crop transfer of lead and arsenic was low.
Key numbers
- Carrot, Badulla: cadmium 0.20 ± 0.04, lead “0.41±0.01”, arsenic 0.10 ± 0.01 mg/kg dry weight (Table 7).
- Red onion, Kalpitiya: lead 0.324 ± 0.05 mg/kg dry weight (Table 7).
- Cabbage, Nuwara Eliya: lead 0.015 mg/kg dry weight (Table 7).
Methods (brief)
Vegetables washed, root crops peeled, oven dried at 60 °C, microwave digested with nitric acid and hydrogen peroxide, and analysed by ICP-OES. Tomato leaves reference material recoveries were 82 to 90%; detection limits are not reported.
Evidence Fitness
The samples come from the same 2018 to 2020 campaign as the authors’ Journal of Dry Zone Agriculture paper, which gives fresh-weight crop means; this paper adds dry-weight location means, so the two should not be counted as independent datasets. Field samples, not retail; whether Table 7 dispersion is SD or SE is not stated. Individual vegetables are a proxy for vegetables-mixed: the paper does not measure a mixed-vegetable product, so it is not linked to that page.