Dissolved organic matter (DOM) can strongly interact with both organic and inorganic contaminants to influence their transportation, transformation, bioavailability, toxicity and even their ultimate fate. Within this work, DOM was extracted from urban stormwater runoff samples collected from a regular sampling site of a typical residential area in Beijing, China. Copper(II) ions were selected as model to investigate the interactions between DOM and typical heavy metals. Both ultraviolet (UV) absorbance and fluorescence titration methods were introduced to determine the complex capacities (CL) and conditional stability constants (log KM) of bonding between DOM and copper (II) ions, which revealed that the values of CL were 85.62 and 87.23 μmol mg-1 and the log KM values were 5.37 and 5.48, respectively. The results suggested the successful complexation between DOM and copper(II) ions. Furthermore, morphology of the DOM binding to copper(II) ions was confirmed by both energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), which can facilitate to clarify the corresponding mechanism. The Cu 2p3/2 peak at 933.7 eV and the characteristic shake-up peaks of Cu-O were found in the XPS spectra, implying that copper(II) ions might coordinate with hydroxyl (aliphatic or phenolic) or carboxyl groups. With these profitable results, it can be concluded that DOM in urban stormwater runoff has a strong binding affinity with copper(II) ions, which may further lead to potentially significant influence on their migration and transformation.
Keywords: Stormwater runoff; copper ions; dissolved organic matter; interaction mechanism; titration.