Determination of Lead and Cadmium Concentration in Different Samples of Tea and Coffee Circulating in the Libyan Market

The study focused on determining the levels of lead and cadmium in some samples of the best-selling and popular tea and coffee among people in Tripoli city-Libya during the years 2018-2019. Atomic Absorption Spectroscopy (AAS) has been used to determine the concentrate of cadmium and lead ions in different 17 tea samples, and 11 coffee samples. The mean values of cadmium and lead in (mg/kg) in tea samples as follows: The highest value for cadmium was found in Libton tea sample 0.260 ? 0.017, while the lowest value was found in Alkoozi red tea and Alfrdous tea samples 0.037 ? 0.006, with the overall mean was 0.119 ? 0.054. The highest value for lead was found in Alkoozi green tea sample 2.153 ? 0.012, while the lowest value was found in Alzahra tea sample 0.187 ? 0.002, with the overall mean was 1.118 ? 0.612. The results show that there are no significant differences in the values of lead in all coffee samples, which ranged from 1.23 to 1.62 mg/kg with the overall mean was 1.277 ? 0.358, except Sheikh Hbahanbelend coffee sample 0.271? 0.002 mg/kg. While the cadmium concentration in coffee samples ranged from 0.022 to 0.064 mg/kg, with the mean value 0.0514?0.0012. From these results can be noticed that coffee samples have about 11 times higher concentration of cadmium than tea, whereas the concentration of lead in tea is about 22 times higher than that in coffee samples.