INOGEV project: an original French approach in micropollutant characterization assessment in urban wet weather effluents and atmospheric deposits

Monitoring of priority and/or emerging substances to generate information about their occurrence and effects in the environment has become an important issue in particular in Europe with the implementation of the Water Framework Directive (WFD). However, there is a need to harmonize, at least at the national level, the contaminants to be followed, on the monitoring, sampling procedures & analytical methods in order to provide input for databases useful for researchers, operators in charge of stormwater management. INOGEV project (2010-2013) is an ambitious multidisciplinary project launched in early 2010 by the national network HURRBIS gathering three advanced research French observatories in the field of stormwater management. Micropollutants study in stormwater field is a recent issue, more and more developed at a worldwide scale. However, both separate sewers systems and atmospheric micropollutants have been few studied until now. Focusing on INOGEV research program in progress, it appears clearly a difficulty to establish comparisons between results due to structural differences on the assessed molecules, on the monitored compartments and even on sample and analytical processing. The approach followed by the project presented in the paper aims at giving some clues to overcome those problems. The first step of this project was devoted to the harmonization of the analytical protocols from sampling up to the analysis in itself. This paper presents how this aspect has been conducted.