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Water Pollution
Pretreatment Program Shows Little Progress Since 1990s, EPA Inspector General Says
Gains made in the pretreatment program under the Clean Water Act have leveled
off since the mid-1990s, and steps are needed to ensure it continues to fulfill
the goal of eliminating toxic pollutants from U.S. waters, the Environmental
Protection Agency inspector general has reported.
The report, EPA Needs to Reinforce Its National Pretreatment Program said the
pretreatment program was in danger of losing the gains it made in the early
1980s if the agency's leadership did not act in several areas, including the
adoption of "results-based performance measures."
The EPA Office of Water is in the process of overhauling its permitting program
with an initiative known as Permitting for Environmental Results (PER). In
comments on an earlier draft of the inspector general's report, officials in the
Office of Water said they expected many of the problems to be addressed through
this effort.
The pretreatment program, set up as part of the National Pollutant Discharge
Elimination System permit program, is designed to prevent toxic pollutants,
including heavy metals, discharged by industrial facilities from interfering
with or passing through publicly owned treatment works (POTWs), which handle
most municipal wastewater.
Additional Facilities Need Approval
In the 1980s, when EPA first began developing and implementing effluent
limitation guidelines, the amount of industrial pollutants discharged to POTWs
declined by about 50 percent, the inspector general's report said.
Then these "transfers" doubled between 1995 and 2001, the report said. The
increase was attributed largely to the changes in reporting requirements for the
Toxics Release Inventory that added more pollutants. Without these additional
pollutants, however, the program showed little change.
The report, which was released Sept. 28, also cited the addition of nitrate
compounds, most of which POTWs are able to treat through their biological
treatment process.
Currently, about 1,500 POTWs are approved to run their own pretreatment
programs, but the inspector general recommended that more facilities get
approval. Operational plants were more likely to be reported by facilities
lacking approved pretreatment programs, and these plants were also more likely
to discharge to impaired waters, the report said.
In cases where treatment plants lack authority to run their pretreatment
programs, the state or EPA steps in.
About 17 percent of the POTWs with approved pretreatment programs experienced
situations where pollutants either passed through or interfered with the
operations of the plant compared to 40 percent without approved programs, the
inspector general said.
Likewise, only 25 percent of the facilities approved to run their own
pretreatment programs discharged to a body of water listed as impaired compared
to 60 percent without approved programs, the report said.
"One possible explanation is that EPA Regions and State agencies that are
supposed to act as control authorities for POTWs without approved programs do
not have standards for overseeing industrial users discharging to these POTWs,"
the report said.
The EPA Office of Water had been working on guidance for these regions and
states, but the effort was sidetracked by other priorities, the report said.
Adam Krantz, a spokesman for the Association of Metropolitan Sewerage Agencies,
told BNA Oct. 8 that municipalities generally want to get approval to run their
own programs.
He said the findings demonstrate that municipalities do a better job of running
the pretreatment program, most likely because they are "on the ground" operating
the facility.
The inspector general said the program could be improved overall by having the
Office of Water "take stock of the pretreatment program by determining a
meaningful performance measure that entails continued improvement, establishing
a mechanism to achieve that goal, and, lastly, acquiring additional resources to
implement necessary programmatic improvements."
Better to Focus on 'Incompatible Pollutants.'
The agency commented that the inspector general findings may be somewhat
misleading with regard to the leveling off of pollutants discharged to POTWs
because in many cases, the pollutants are adequately treated through the
facilities' biological process. A more accurate assessment of the program might
instead focus on "incompatible pollutants," such as metals, cyanide, and
organics whose discharges pose the greatest risk.
"We believe that our review shows that when EPA applied resources to
implementing its pretreatment program, reductions in transfers of toxic
pollutants resulted," the inspector general said in response to the water office
comments. "As the program received less attention and [fewer] resources, those
results leveled off."
The water office said improvements would be realized through the PER program
whereby states and regions will submit "profiles" on the tools they are using to
implement their NPDES programs.
"Via the PER Profiles, we are documenting information on the EPA Regions and
States Pretreatment Program oversight capabilities, as well as information
regarding efficiencies and innovations used to achieve workload efficiency and
maintain a high level of productivity," the water office said in its comments on
the report.
The EPA inspector general's report, EPA Needs to Reinforce Its National
Pretreatment Program, is available at http://www.epa.gov/oigearth/reports/water.htm
on the World Wide Web.
By Susan Bruninga