GAO Report Finds EPA Fails To Control Industrial Water Polluters

 Industrial Pollution Limits & Technology Not Updated Since the 1980’s

Given that millions of NJ residents drink water from rivers that receive industrial wastewater discharges, you might want to think about this next time you turn on your tap.

Last week, I focused on serious flaws in DEP regulations and permit programs, noting:

• DEP’s failure to ratchet down on industrial non-point water pollution;
• DEP’s failure to regulate greenhouse gas emissions;
• DEP’s failure to update standards and permits to reflect current science and data;
• DEP’s new enforcement priorities that stress voluntary “sustainable development”.

I forgot to mention that at the same time DEP enforcement priorities and staffing are shifting to “get more done with partnerships”, that DEP is almost 3 years behind in issuing the mandatory annual Report required by the Clean Water Enforcement Act (CWEA). (Why is there no legislative oversight or press scrutiny of that?)

But many of the same problems in DEP regulatory oversight are mirrored at the federal level at US EPA.

In response to my posts, a Washington DC colleague sent me a recent General Accounting Office (GAO) Report  that makes similar observations, blasting US EPA’s industrial wastewater control program under the Clean Water Act.

According to beltway trade publication, Inside EPA, E&E Reporter:

EPA has failed to fully tackle industrial polluters — GAO

Annie Snider, E&E reporter

Published: Thursday, October 11, 2012

U.S. EPA likely has not been cracking down on industrial water pollution as hard as it should have, due to a flawed process for reviewing effluent guidelines, a government watchdog agency said yesterday.

The two-phase process EPA uses to decide which guidelines to review means the majority of industries never get an adequate look, according to a new Government Accountability Office report.

Under the Clean Water Act, EPA is supposed to annually review guidelines for pollutants being discharged from industrial facilities such as factories and wastewater treatment plants in order to decide whether new information about the pollutants’ dangers or about technologies available to decrease them warrants lower limits.

But most guidelines have not been updated since the 1980s or 1990s. Moreover, in recent years, EPA’s focus has shifted from point sources — such as the industrial facilities covered by these effluent guidelines — to nonpoint sources such as agricultural and urban runoff, which are now responsible for most pollution making its way into waterways. Staff levels for the effluent guidelines program have been cut 40 percent, EPA officials told GAO.

(sorry no link to the complete E&E Reporter story, it’s a subscription service – but you can read the full GAO Report – it provides an excellent background and history of  the Clean Water Act’s industrial effluent program requirements and EPA’s implementation efforts).

GAO found a number of significant flaws, particularly regarding EPA failure to monitor pollution discharges, to update data or correct errors in industry data, to  incorporate advances in treatment technology, and to ratchet down on industrial NPDES permits for discharges of toxic pollutants.

The Clean Water Act requires that these industrial pollution permits reflect “the best available control technology” and the EPA is required to review and upgrade these technologies annually. So these are massive and fundamental failures by EPA to properly regulate industrial dischargers, particularly some of the most toxic pollution.

The water pollution control permits (NJPDES) for many of these facilities  are governed by the flawed industrial effluent guidelines targeted in the GAO Report. According to DEP’s most recent CWEA Report, DEP regulates 640 point source discharges to NJ waters.

Lax permit pollution limits and failure to update permits could explain the apparent contradiction I discussed last week: high permit compliance rates but declining environmental quality. As I noted, the answer to that is stricter permits and enforcement.

So NJ water quality and our drinking water are put at significant risk by these EPA and DEP regulatory failures.

Here are some of the more significant and troubling findings from the GAO Report:

EPA documents and some experts we contacted also stated that data collected in the Toxics Release Inventory are useful to identify toxic discharges. Nevertheless, according to the agency and experts, these inventory data have limitations that may cause EPA to either overestimate or underestimate the relative toxicity of particular industrial categories. The limitations they identified include the following:

Limitations in Hazard Data May Have Caused EPA to Overlook Industrial Categories 

The two sources EPA relies on during its initial screening process— discharge monitoring reports and the Toxic Release Inventory—have limitations that may affect the agency’s ability to accurately rank industrial categories for further review on the basis of the human health and environmental hazards associated with those categories. Data from industrial facilities’ discharge monitoring reports have the benefit of being national in scope, according to EPA documents, but according to agency officials and some experts we spoke with, these data have several limitations that could lead the agency to underestimate the hazard caused by particular industries. Specifically:

• The reports contain data only for those pollutants that facilities’ permits require them to monitor. Under NPDES, states and EPA offices issue permits containing limits for pollutant discharges, but those permits may not include limits for all the pollutants that may be discharged, as for example, if those pollutants are not included in the relevant effluent guidelines or need not be limited for the facility to meet state water quality standards.30 If a pollutant is not identified in a permit, and hence not reported on discharge monitoring reports, it would not be part of EPA’s calculation of hazard and would not count toward the ranking of industrial categories.

• The reports do not include data from all permitted facilities. Specifically, EPA does not require the states to report monitoring results from direct dischargers classified as minor. According to EPA, the agency in 2010 analyzed data for approximately 15,000 minor facilities, or about 37 percent of the 40,500 minor facilities covered by NPDES permits. As a result, the pollutants discharged by the remaining 25,500 minor dischargers would not be counted as part of the relative toxicity rating and could contribute to undercounting of pollutants from those industrial categories. For example, most coal mining companies in Pennsylvania and West Virginia are considered minor dischargers whose pollutants would not count toward the ranking of that industrial category.

• The reports include very limited data characterizing indirect discharges from industrial facilities to wastewater treatment plants, according to EPA documents. Thus, the data do not fully document pollutants that, if not removed by a wastewater treatment plant, are discharged. These data are not incorporated into EPA’s calculations of hazard for each industrial category, and thus result in underestimated hazards.31 …