Management of effluents that produce minimally chronic or ephemeral toxicity: Lessons learned
Conference
·
OSTI ID:212017
- EA Engineering, Science and Technology, Inc., Sparks, MD (United States)
The NPDES permitting process has been managed using a Water Quality Based Permitting Approach since the US EPA`s 9 March 1984 National Policy Statement. Since that time, the regulating community has taken a phased approach to address environmental situations based on acute toxicity concerns followed more recently by chronic toxicity issues. The NPDES permit for individual discharges often combines the use of chemical specific limits and whole effluent toxicity either for monitoring or permit limits as a means to manage effluents. One of the major tools available to permittees is a Toxicity Reduction Evaluation (TRE), which is a strategy to characterize, identify, and control effluents that have the reasonable potential to exceed either chemical specific limits and/or are toxic to aquatic organisms. As the maturation of the program develops, more and more of the persistent acute toxicity problems identified during the NPDES permit process are being addressed successfully. However, the remaining NPDES permit issues often concern chronically toxic effluents or infrequently toxic effluents. Through the use of case studies, this paper presents modified strategies for addressing effluents that produce minimally chronic toxicity, that are infrequently toxic, or that have ephemeral toxicity. In these situations, toxicity often cannot be observed long enough to confidently identify the toxicant or properly develop control strategies. This paper will also describe TREs in which the source of toxicity and/or the toxicant have changed during the course of the evaluation. This often is a result of the facility`s modifying its operational activities to address the original permit exceedance.
- OSTI ID:
- 212017
- Report Number(s):
- CONF-9511137--; ISBN 1-880611-03-1
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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