Environmental groups sue EPA over water pollution standards

Photo: The Houston Ship Channel in February. A lawsuit filed by a group of environmental groups says the Environmental Protection Agency has failed to update its standards that control how much pollution industry can discharge into waterways. Credit: Mark Felix for The Texas Tribune

A coalition of environmental groups claims the EPA has failed for decades to update limits on the discharge of some dangerous chemicals into waterways. Most of the worst polluters are in Texas.

More than a dozen environmental groups are suing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for not revising its water pollution-control standards, which regulate the amount of harmful chemicals that can be dumped into rivers, lakes and streams. The groups claim the current standards haven’t been updated in decades, which violates the Clean Water Act.

Oil refineries, chemical and plastic plants, and other industrial facilities “dump billions of gallons of wastewater that contain nitrogen that fuels algae blooms and dead zones and toxins that are harmful to both humans and aquatic life like benzene and selenium,” said Jen Duggan, deputy director for the Environmental Integrity Project, one of the groups that’s suing the agency.

The lawsuit, which asks the federal government to direct the EPA to review its decision to not revise pollution limits earlier this year, was filed Tuesday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in San Francisco.

Pollution standards for these industries were last updated 30, sometimes nearly 40 years ago, according to a letter sent by the organizations to […]

Full article: Environmental groups sue EPA over water pollution standards