Senator Muskie in 1972 on the Senate floor: ” This Act simple means that we can not use our rivers to treat our sewage any longer.”
The goal of the Clean Water Act was to eliminate all water pollution by 1985, but since that was not yet possible, Congress demanded initially ‘secondary sewage’ treatment for all point-source discharges. Secondary treatment, Congress was told, represented 85% treatment and when EPA implemented the CWA by demanding NPDES (National Pollution Discharge Elimination System) permits, it used the BOD (Biochemical Oxygen Demand) test to set sewage treatment standards. The BOD test was developed around 1910 in England and measures how much oxygen bacteria need to break down organic, both fecal and urine, waste and requires 30 days. Because those bacteria using nitrogenous (urine and protein) waste in fresh raw sewage only contribute to the test reading after 6 to 10 days and their oxygen use also can be measured with a faster nitrogen test, it became acceptable, as a timesaver, to use the 5-day reading of the BOD test or BOD5 in combination with this nitrogen test. Although essential for the BOD test, this nitrogen test in many countries, was later ignored and many regulations now only address the BOD5 test value.
Using the BOD5 test without any nitrogen data is not only technically incorrect, but very misleading.
The same happened when the EPA set ‘secondary sewage treatment’ standards and addressed 85% of the BOD5 test. This BOD5 test value however only represents 40% of the total BOD value, hence EPA only addressed 85% of 40% or 33% of the BOD pollution in sewage. By doing so, EPA not only ignored 60% of the pollution that exerts an oxygen demand, but all the nitrogenous (urine and protein) waste, while this waste also is a fertilizer for algae.
EPA claims that this, now called nutrient pollution, was not intended to be treated under the CWA and that this pollution is the responsibility of individual states. States in turn, by adhering to EPA’s regulations, are violating their own water pollution regulation, as they would not allow their open waters to be used as urinals.
Meanwhile our open waters are overgrown with algae, not only causing dead zones, but also closures of drinking water plants. Also generating numerous lawsuits, as EPA now mainly claims that this pollution is caused by the runoffs from cities and farms, while refusing to correct BOD testing and still refusing to set treatment standards for nitrogenous waste in municipal sewage.
Blaming mostly farmers or nutrient pollution, while the same type of pollution is ignored in municipal sewage, does not make any sense.
The incorrect BOD testing is causing many other problems, as we still can not evaluate how sewage is treated and the possibility exists that multi-million dollar sewage treatment plants are designed to treat the wrong waste in sewage.
Before any more time and money is wasted on lawsuits and new programs, EPA should be held accountable, preferable by a member of Congress, as they should make sure that the laws they passed are properly implemented. This also poses a challenge for the media, who for more than 34 years shied away, claiming it was too technical to understand, while it should not be too hard to understand that when a test requires 30 days, its 5-day reading is going to miss a lot the test intended to measure.