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Although runoff from trafficked urban areas is recognized as a potentially significant pathway of micropollutants, runoff pollution remains poorly documented, except for relatively few historical pollutants such as some metals and hydrocarbons. Therefore, in this work, road and parking lot runoff from four sites with contrasting traffic levels were analyzed for a very broad spectrum of molecules and elements. A total of 128 pollutants and micropollutants were monitored, including inorganic (n = 41) and organic (n = 87) pollutants. Both the dissolved and particulate phases were considered. For a reduced number of samples, non-targeted screening by high-resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS) was carried out. For targeted screening, the contamination profiles were quite homogeneous, but the concentrations significantly differed between the different sites. Sites with the highest traffic density exhibited the highest concentrations for polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), some traffic-related metals, alkylphenols and phthalates. Overall, for most micropollutants, the parking lot runoff exhibited the lowest concentrations, and the specificity of this site was confirmed by its HRMS fingerprint. Non-target screening allowed the sites to be discriminated based on the occurrence of specific compounds. Unlike the results of targeted screening, the HRMS intra-site variability was lower than its inter-site variability. Unknown substances were tentatively identified, either characteristic of each site or ubiquitous of all samples.

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A stochastic method for evaluating the in situ mass balance of micropollutants in a stormwater biofilter, accounting for inlet and outlet loads and the evolution of pollutant mass in the filter media (ΔMsoil) at an annual scale, is proposed. In the field context, this type of calculation presents a number of methodological challenges, associated with estimating water quality for unsampled rain events, reconstituting missing or invalidated flow data and accounting for significant uncertainties associated with these estimations and experimental measurements. The method is applied to a biofiltration swale treating road runoff for two trace metals, Cu and Zn and six organic micropollutants: pyrene (Pyr), phenanthrene (Phen), bisphenol-A (BPA), octylphenol (OP), nonylphenol (NP) and bis(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (DEHP). Pollutant loads were reduced by 27–72%. While organic micropollutants are likely to be lost to degradation or volatilization processes in such systems, dissipation could not be demonstrated for any of the organic micropollutants studied due to emissions from construction materials (case of BPA, OP, NP and DEHP) or high uncertainties in ΔMsoil (case of Pyr and Phen). The necessary conditions for establishing an in situ mass balance demonstrating dissipation, which include acquisition of data associated with all terms over a period long enough that uncertainty propagation is limited and the absence of additional sources of pollutants in the field, are discussed.