Abstract
Due to their large impervious coverage, highways are ideal sites for the transport of pollutants to either treatment units or direct discharge to waterways. Mercury, a highly toxic and ubiquitous environmental contaminant, is rarely studied in stormwater runoff. Removal of particulate-bound mercury in a dry detention basin was analyzed for the five size fractions: , 0.45–8 μm, 8–20 μm, 20–100 μm, and . The highest concentration of mercury for both influent and effluent is observed in the 8–20 μm size fraction. Treatment units are often characterized by suspended solids removal efficiency and particle-bound pollutants correlated to suspended solids removal; however, different suspended solids removal efficiency may occur in specific particle size fractions. Therefore, the benefits of treatment units may be different than originally anticipated, especially if the particle-bound concentrations are greater in fractions more efficiently removed. For sedimentation-based treatment units, the removal is dependent on size fraction, and when one size fraction is captured more efficiently, the removal rate calculated using the entire sample might indicate particle-bound pollutant removal quite different than actually occurring.
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Data Availability Statement
All data, models, and code generated or used during the study appear in the submitted article.
Acknowledgments
This study was supported in part by the Division of Environmental Analysis, Caltrans, through a contract with the University of California, Task Order 43A0073. Marcia Ferreira was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program Grant DGE-0707424 (2009–2012) and by the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Dissertation Year Fellowship (2012–2013). The authors thank Dr. Sim-Lin Lau and all the UCLA graduate students who worked on the sample collection and processing.
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Published In
Journal of Environmental Engineering
Volume 147 • Issue 2 • February 2021
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© 2020 American Society of Civil Engineers.
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Received: Feb 21, 2020
Accepted: Sep 10, 2020
Published online: Nov 20, 2020
Published in print: Feb 1, 2021
Discussion open until: Apr 20, 2021
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