EPA Plan For Strict New Ammonia Water Criteria Draws Industry Worries

摘要

Epa is planning to drop a flexible, two-tiered approach for a new water quality criteria for ammonia that it is developing and will continue with its planned approach to set a strict new risk-based criteria that relies in part on harms to invasive species, an approach that is drawing significant concern from the wastewater treatment industry. In a recent letter to the agency, the industry says setting risk-based standards to protect invasive species appears inconsistent with the Clean Water Act (CWA) and calls on EPA to craft guidance for how to address the issue. In general, the agency crafts water quality criteria - risk-based concentrations of pollutants for protecting water quality - that are then used to set permit and other regulatory limits. EPA began revising its ammonia criteria in 2004, after the Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS) presented EPA with new toxicity data for freshwater mussels that implied tighter criteria may be necessary. In 2009, the agency proposed a two-tiered approach for the criteria requiring waterbodies where freshwater mussels are present to have stricter limits than waters with no mussels.