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TRENDS IN TRANSFERS OF TOXIC POLLUTANTS TO POTWS IN EPA REGION 5, 1988-2002
Impact/Purpose:
Report/working document to share with regional management, various headquarters offices, other regions and states for their information and use. We also hope to get authorization to post all or most of it on our regional pretreatment website for public access.
Description:
More than 30 years after establishment of the National Pretreatment Program to control nondomestic discharges to Publicly Owned Treatment Works (POTW), there continues to be a lack of direct environmental performance measures to gauge the effectiveness of the Program in achieving its goals. In an effort to address this issue, a previous report examined trends in the transfer of various types of toxic chemicals to POTWs and also compared those transfers to discharges to surface water and underground injection, in Region 5, during the 1988 to 1993 period, using data from the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI). The TRI mandates annual reporting to EPA by a broad range of industries of amounts of a list of chemicals disposed of inside and outside their facilities. The current report continues the analysis, using more recent TRI data. In addition, it has been expanded to address longstanding questions regarding loading trends for key industrial sectors within the region, and to assist in identifying additional Industrial Users potentially covered by the Program. Lists of top transferrers of the various chemical groups, and of the top chemicals transferred are also provided.