Metal pollutants in the waters of Tvertsa river (Tver region, Russia)

Numerous tributaries generally define the level of pollution of larger rivers. Unfortunately, the system of regional monitoring in Russian does not always cover those tributaries, being focused on large waterbodies. The monitoring of smaller waterbodies can be effectively carried out by the social ecological monitoring programs. As a part of such monitoring we conducted the inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectroscopy (ICP-AES) to evaluate the content of metals in the waters of Tvertsa River, one of the tributes of Volga River in Tver Region. We detected 25 metals (Al, As, B, Ba, Bi, Ca, Cr, Cu, Fe, Ga, Ge, K, Li, Mg, Mn, Mo, Na, Sb, Se, Sn, Sr, Ti, V, W, Zr) in the waters, taken in the ranges of three large cities of the Region. Most of the metals did not exceed the norms of concentrations set in Russian Federation. Four of them (As, Sb, Se и Fe) did, though. The highest concentrations of metals in the waters were recorded for the largest city of the region, its capital, Tver.