Toxic Waste Dumping in Water

Toxic waste dumping in water is something most people associate with days gone by--the pre-Clean Water Act, Superfund cleanup sites and Love Canal-type abuses. Unfortunately, almost 40 years later there is still a great deal of dumping going on and a lot of it is legal. Due to changes in the definitions of some key terms in the Clean Water Act, many companies are dumping without penalty into source waters and lakes.

History

• The Clean Water Act passed in 1972 and was designed as part of a broader movement toward conservation of wildlife and the environment that also featured the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to enforce them. The Clean Water Act made it punishable by law to pollute surface water and to actively allow polluted runoff into protected waters. It also focused on the restoration and maintenance of the ecological integrity of protected waters.

Toxins

• Toxic waste dumped into water comes from a whole host of sources: mines, power plants, factories, refineries, farms, paper mills, hospitals and labs, garages, sewage treatment plants and construction sites. They can contain pathogens, radiation, heavy metals and chemicals. These toxins can damage ecosystems and harm or kill vital plants, fish and animals. Many of these toxins also have serious side effects on humans, including birth defects, neurological damage and even cancer. They enter the body through drinking or swimming in contaminated water or by eating fish that live in the contaminated water. Some, like arsenic, mercury and lead, accumulate in the body over time until they reach toxic levels.

Regulations

• Capture, transport, disposal and storage of toxic waste is highly regulated and requires many safeguards. This waste is burned, recycled or stored in specially designated hazardous waste dumps, at great expense to industry. Many companies find it cheaper to simply dump the waste into a body of water and pay the fines when they get caught. According to the New York Times, Allegheny Energy of Southwest Pennsylvania's Hatfield's Ferry power plant has violated the Clean Water Act 33 times from 2006 through early 2010. Allegheny Energy paid less than $26,000 total in fines on these violations, while earning $1.1 billion in that same period.

Redefinitions

• Due to Supreme Court rulings during the 2000s, the definitions of the bodies of water covered under the Clean Water Act as well as what constitutes "fill" have eroded the intent of the act. Legislation passed under the Bush administration removed any waters that are non-navigable from protection, opening up any small body of water--a stream, creek, pond or wetland--to legal dumping without permits. There is nothing placing limits on non-navigable bodies of water that are part of the watershed, or source water, for larger bodies and for drinking water. According to the EPA, these excluded waters are drinking water sources for around 117 million Americans.

Effects

• The reliance of the Supreme Court in a 2009 decision on an internal EPA memo from the Bush administration era has opened up the definition of what constitutes "fill" that can be legally dumped in water to include sludge and slurry comprised of heavy metals and other toxic compounds. For the next 10 years, around 210,000 gallons of slurry filled wastewater will be legally dumped into Lower Slate Lake in Alaska by Coeur Alaska, a gold mining company. Environmentalists claim that by the end of the dumping period, fish and aquatic life in the lake will die and the mercury from the slurry will accumulate in local wildlife. This ruling will affect other cases in Alaska as well as in Appalachian mining areas.