Industrial User

Industrial User in the United States

Industrial User in Environmental Law

An industrial firm that does not discharge wastewater directly into a stream or other water body but uses a public treatment facility to treat its waste before it is discharged. An industrial user is also referred to as an indirect discharger. See direct discharger. Because industrial users often produce a different type of waste than that normally treated by a publicly owned treatment works, they are subject to pretreatment standards under the Clean Water Act.

There are two types of pretreatment: general and categorical. All industrial users must meet the general standards. Categorical standards are industry specific and apply primarily to 34 industries (approximately 700 subcategories are included) and 65 toxic pollutants.

Development of Pretreatment Standards

The Clean Water Act of 1972 created a lot of work for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) but gave it insufficient guidance on toxic pollutant regulation. The section that dealt with toxic pollutants made it difficult for the agency to assign a particular substance to the priority pollutant list. When the EPA did list a substance, it had the burden of proving it belonged there. Consequently, the agency focused its attention on conventional pollutants.

Conventional pollutants such as alkalinity/acidity, biochemical oxygen demand, and suspended solids, are the primary pollutants released from publicly owned treatment works. The decision to regulate them was important, but more hazardous industrial pollutants remained largely unregulated. So the Natural Resources Defense Council sued the Environmental Protection Agency for its failure to address toxic pollutants. The EPA settled the case, and the resulting consent decree established the toxic pollutant regulatory scheme. In the settlement, the parties identified the primary toxic pollutants, polluting industries, and methods of regulating them. Basically, the EPA was asked to develop programs to address 65 categories of priority pollutants (including 129 specific chemicals) and 34 categories of industries. More than 70 percent of industry was affected by the agreement. The consent decree also required the use of best available technology when setting the standards.

Congress amended the Clean Water Act in 1977 to reflect the terms of the agreement. The 1977 amendments also established a procedure for removing or adding substances to the priority pollutant list and increased the EPA’s enforcement authority. The consent decree was modified to accommodate the changes in the statute.

General Pretreatment Standards

The premise behind pretreatment is that pollutants must be treated, not simply dumped into a system unprepared to deal with them and thus allowed to escape management. The pretreatment standards anticipate and prevent an industrial user from skirting the permit process to escape pretreatment. Even if an industry obtains its own permit to discharge wastewater into a treatment system, it must meet pretreatment standards before the discharge.

The general standards prohibit an industry from interfering with the ability of a publicly owned treatment works to treat domestic wastewater. The prohibition includes dumping solids or thick liquids that disrupt flow; dumping petroleum products, highly alkaline wastes, and pollutants that cause physical reactions to workers at the treatment plant; creating fire or explosion hazards; and raising the water temperature high enough to inhibit biological action. Even if the pollutants added are the same as those normally treated by the plant, large amounts or high concentrations can upset the balance and cause violations of the treatment plant’s permit. Industries that process food, for example, frequently discharge large amounts of conventional pollutants.

Another prohibition of the general standards is contributing pass-through wastes, although the categorical standards deal with this problem more directly. Pass-through waste is exactly what it sounds like: waste that goes through the system without treatment. If a particular waste is sent to a plant incapable of dealing with it, it remains untreated.

Categorical Pretreatment Standards

The categorical standards were first established in the NRDC consent decree, and they have changed very little since they were agreed upon. Three specific pollutants have been removed from the original 129 on the list of priority pollutants, but the 65 pollutant categories remain, as do the 34 industry categories. Priority pollutants include chromium and its compounds, lead and its compounds, asbestos, benzene, and cyanides. Industries covered by the categorical standards include canned and preserved seafood processors; sugar processors; textile mills; cement manufacturers; organic chemical, plastics, and synthetic fiber producers; inorganic chemical manufacturers.

Industrial users must pretreat their waste before they send it to a publicly owned treatment works unless the plant is capable of consistently removing the pollutants the industry contributes. A large treatment plant one with a total design flow of 5 million or more gallons per day must have an approved pretreatment program if it accepts incompatible wastes from industrial users.
Based on “Environment and the Law. A Dictionary”.


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