The discharge of sewage from any of these sources into our surface water without treatment violates the Clean Water Acts, which should be strictly enforced.
Inadequate treatment of industrial wastewater that is discharged directly into waterways or into sewer systems that discharge to waterways. While this problem is supposed to be controlled by federal surface water discharge permits, permit conditions are not always complied with and the EPA has inadequate staff to do comprehensive enforcement. Furthermore, many industries don’t even know what all the toxic chemicals are that they are using, and thus their treatment practices are often ineffective. Again, all these discharges violate the Clean Water Acts, which should be strictly enforced.
Massachusetts regulations require industries to identify and report dangerous chemicals in their wastewater discharges to sewers, but the rules are not yet being implemented. This is unacceptable.
Discharges of medicines and “personal care products” into our waterways are largely unregulated. In many cases it isn’t clear if they pose a real danger and, even if they do, effective treatment methods have not always been identified. Discharges of medicines into water bodies are particularly difficult to deal with; while some of them come from people flushing unused medicines down the toilet, a large percentage of the medicines we take are not absorbed by our bodies but rather are eliminated into our toilets. Addressing this problem has become a major new frontier for water pollution control.
Dangerous toxic chemicals remain in the sediments below most old industrial rivers in Massachusetts, of which there are many. State law does not require that these chemicals be cleaned up except in two situations. First, if they pose an “imminent hazard” to human health (although MassDEP does not consider pregnant women and children eating contaminated fish they catch to pose an imminent hazard, as long as warnings have been posted along the shore by the local board of health). Or secondly, if the chemical can be traced to specific old industrial sites on the banks of the river, something that is extremely difficult to determine and even more difficult to prove. If the party responsible for toxic contamination of sediments beneath our rivers and streams cannot be identified, we believe that government has a moral responsibility to clean them up if they pose a substantial risk to public health or the environment.
Mercury is still being introduced to our waterways at dangerous levels, mainly due to the burning of coal by power plants (most of them in the midwest). Only the federal government can effectively deal with this interstate problem.
Paved Areas a Big Problem. Once upon a time, water pollution was caused mainly by large companies spewing out industrial wastewater and cities discharging untreated sewage into our rivers and streams. But thanks to the federal Clean Water Act (and the hard work of river advocates), those discharges are now highly restricted.