The Clean Water Act has been “almost universally ignored by power companies and permitting agencies,” says a coalition of environmental groups who released a report Tuesday revealing a long list of toxic poisons that are routinely discharged into rivers, lakes and bays across the country.
The report, conducted by Waterkeeper Alliance, Sierra Club, Environmental Integrity Project, Earthjustice and Clean Water Action, studied 386 coal-fired power plants and their local permits and found that substances such as arsenic, boron, cadmium, lead, mercury and selenium are almost continually released into public waterways.
“We look out for lead paint when we buy a home and we clear our kids from the room when a mercury thermometer breaks on the ground—so why would we let the coal industry dump millions of pounds of these poisons into our water?” —Mary Anne Hitt, Sierra Club
According to the groups, “existing standards” that apply to coal plant wastewater were last established in 1982 and have not kept up pace with contemporary coal plant practices, which emit vast amounts of toxic substances in their coal ash and scrubber wastewater discharges that are eventually “dumped” into the environment.
“We look out for lead paint when we buy a home and we clear our kids from the room when a mercury thermometer breaks on the ground—so why would we let the coal industry dump millions of pounds of these poisons into our water?” said Mary Anne Hitt, Director of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign.
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The report, Closing the Floodgates: How the Coal Industry Is Poisoning Our Water and How We Can Stop It, finds that:
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The study finds an extreme lack of any “binding federal standards” that would limit toxic pollution from coal plants.
“The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has repeatedly acknowledged that existing guidelines have not kept pace with developments in the industry,” the group writes. “However, for more than three decades the U.S. EPA has failed to set standards to curb the billions of pounds of pollution power plants dump into our rivers, streams and lakes each year from coal ash and scrubber sludge wastewaters. “
“Allowing coal polluters to fill our rivers and lakes with this witches brew of toxic chemicals threatens public health and diminishes quality of life for Americans,” said Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., President of Waterkeeper Alliance. “The Clean Water Act is one of our nation’s greatest achievements, but 40 years after this critical legislation was passed, the coal industry is still polluting with impunity, thanks to a loophole no other industry has enjoyed.”
Citing recent causes of these weak regulations, Earthjustice’s Climate & Energy Vice President Abigail Dillen, pointed to the White House’s Office of Management and Budget and recent “closed door meetings” in which tough regulations proposed by the EPA were seriously watered down.
Dillen writes:
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