Clean Water Advocacy - Newsroom - AMSA in the News
No. 63
Tuesday, April 2, 2002 Page A-5
ISSN 1521-9402
News
Water Pollution
Sludge Rule to Be Delayed Until 2003; EPA to Issue Notice on New Data for Review
A final rule governing the land application of sewage sludge will be delayed
until late 2003 to give the Environmental Protection Agency and the public time
to consider new data on concentrations of dioxins and dioxin-like compounds, an
agency official said April 1.
Under a consent agreement with environmental groups and municipal wastewater
treatment officials, the agency was to have issued the rule under Section 405(d)
of the Clean Water Act by April 1 (Gearhart v. Whitman, D. Ore., CIV-89-6266,
3/1/02).
Alan Hais, associate director of the Health and Ecological Criteria Division of
the EPA Office of Water, told BNA the agency expects to issue a notice of data
availability later this spring. It will contain new information from an
Association of Metropolitan Sewerage Agencies survey as well as data from EPA
and an assessment of the risks posed by dioxins in the environment, he said.
The agencywide reassessment of dioxins and their effect on human health has been
ongoing for 10 years but has not been made final, although it could be released
later this spring, agency and industry officials have said. The sludge
regulations are being closely watched because they are viewed as a "bellwether"
rule incorporating EPA's updated information on dioxins, an industry official
told BNA.
The agency's dioxin reassessment is expected to show dioxins to be significantly
more potent as a cancer causing agent than previously thought, the industry
official said. This makes the sludge rule even more compelling because the
regulation applies to land application where the potential for human exposure is
greater than it is for other pollutants, one official said.
In December 1999, EPA proposed to prohibit the land application of sludge with
dioxin concentrations exceeding 300 parts per trillion (242 DEN A-8, 12/17/99).
The AMSA study, 2000/2001 Survey of Dioxin-like Compounds in Biosolids: A
Statistical Analysis, showed that the mean concentration of dioxins in biosolids
is much lower than a threshold level proposed by EPA in 1999.
The survey looked at information from 171 publicly owned treatment works and
found the median concentration of dioxins and dioxin-like compounds was 21.7
ppt-TEQ, or total toxic equivalent body burden. The 200 samples showed a range
of concentrations from 7.1 ppt-TEQ to 256 ppt-TEQ (229 DEN A-3, 11/30/01). TEQs
are an internationally recognized approach to evaluating the toxicity of
dioxins.
The dioxins and dioxin-like compounds include seven polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins,
10 polychlorinated dibenzofurans, and 12 dioxin-like coplanar polychlorinated
biphenyls.
The agency has also done its own survey on dioxin concentrations in sludge,
which will be included in the upcoming notice of data availability.
The agreement extending the deadline and spelling out other details had not been
filed with the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon April 1 and
therefore was not publicly available.
By Susan Bruninga