Analysis of Heavy Metals in Various Environmental Samples

Heavy metals are considered to be one of the main sources of environmental pollution with significant effect on the environmental quality. Human activity leads to increasing levels of heavy metal contamination in the environment. An attempt is made in the present investigations to make use of some novel reagents to form complexes with the heavy metals which can be employed to analyse the heavy metals in the environmental samples in an economic, sensitive and rapid way. There are several methods already reported and in use for the determination of trace metals in environmental, biological and pharmaceutical samples which have been discussed in detail so far. Almost all the methods are sensitive, but majority of them need elaborate clean up mechanisms, costly solvents, and sophisticated equipment with skilled personnel to operate. Hence there is always a need to develop simple analytical methods that can be used in the laboratory as additions to the existing literature methods.