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Member Pipeline - Fax Alerts - Special Edition - September 28, 2005

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Special Edition FaxAlert
September 28, 2005

After a Decade of NACWA Advocacy,
EPA Signs Final Pretreatment Streamlining Rule
The final pretreatment streamlining rule was signed late Sept. 27 by U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Stephen Johnson and contains many of the provisions NACWA has long sought. More than a decade of relentless effort and hard work by NACWA and its members has resulted in a rule that will benefit more than 1,500 publicly owned treatment works (POTWs) with approved pretreatment programs and will save hundreds of millions of dollars per year in time and resources that can be targeted to value-added initiatives to benefit water quality. Special gratitude is owed to the tireless work of NACWA’s Pretreatment and Hazardous Waste Committee leadership and, in particular, to Committee Chair Guy Aydlett, Director of Water Quality, Hampton Roads Sanitation District, Virginia Beach, Va.

An initial review of a pre-publication copy of the regulation shows that the new rule will significantly benefit POTWs by:

  • Allowing industrial users (IUs) 45 days, instead of the current 30 days, to submit key reports before they are considered in significant non-compliance (SNC). This extra 15 days should provide most POTWs with enough time to contact the IU and prevent the violation. NACWA has long maintained IUs should not be considered in SNC simply because a report showing no violations was received after the 30-day deadline, often because of delays beyond the IU’s control. Roughly 70 percent of SNC determinations result from late reports rather than actual violations of discharge limits that can harm the environment and give the public a false impression concerning the demonstrated effectiveness of the national pretreatment program.
  • Providing POTWs the flexibility to convert traditional concentration-based limits to mass-based limits on a case-by-case basis. This revision will remove an obstacle that kept some IUs from undertaking water conservation measures out of fear they would violate their concentration-based limits and resulted in violations for those that tried to implement such measures.
  • Establishing a tiered structure for regulating categorical industrial users (CIUs). Rather than automatically treating all CIUs as significant industrial users, the rule allows any CIU discharging less than 100 gallons per day (GPD) of process wastewater to be considered non-significant (NCIU). More importantly, EPA is also adopting NACWA’s proposal to establish another threshold below which CIUs will also be considered non-significant. The new threshold limits the discharge of process wastewater to 0.01 percent of the design capacity of the POTW with a 5,000 gallon-per-day (GPD) cap. (For example, a 1 MGD POTW = 100 GPD NCIU or a 50 MGD POTW = 5,000 GPD NCIU.)
  • Eliminating the need to sample for pollutants not present and providing POTWs with greater flexibility to issue general permits for significant industrial users.

NACWA staff obtained a prepublication copy of the regulation Sept. 28, which is available on NACWA’s website at http://www.nacwa.org/private/reg_outreach.cfm. NACWA staff is reviewing the rule and will make a detailed analysis of the regulation and how it will affect POTWs available to members in an upcoming Regulatory Alert.

Please contact Susan Bruninga, NACWA Manager of Regulatory Affairs, at (202) 833-3280 or at sbruninga@nacwa.org with any questions regarding this important rule.