Courts push states, EPA to create TMDL water programs Nonpoint water pollution sources such as logging, mining, and farming may come under tighter control now that courts are forcing EPA and states to regulate water quality with total maximum daily loads (TMDLs). An often ignored feature of the 1972 Clean Water Act, TMDLs identify the pollution contributed to a body of water by different sources and allocate reductions among the sources to meet water quality standards. States have largely avoided establishing TMDLs because they lack the authority to regulate nonpoint sources, said Thomas Henry, manager of the TMDL program in EPA's Region 3. In more than 22 lawsuits filed over the past three years, environmentalists charged that EPA should have been checking to make sure states were preparing the TMDLs. Court decisions over the past two years in Georgia and Idaho as well as a January consent decree between EPA and environmental ffroups in West Virginia set schedules for those states to complete TMDLs for hundreds of water bodies The decisions require EPA to step in and set the TMDLs if the states do not The West Virginia consent decree requires the state to comnlete TMDLs on more than 5OO waterways over the next 10 years, and EPA has agreed to take over if the state fails to meet annual milestones. To create a TMDL for a specific body of water, states first take samples to identify the types and concentrations of pollutants. EPA allows states to consider a wide range of pollutants, including toxins, nutrients, metals, and sediments, and less traditional concerns such as water temperature and flow. The states then determine what level of pollution in a body of water is acceptable for water quality standards to be met They then calculate background concentrations and pollution from point sources such as factories and wastewater treatment facilities The remaining Dollution is attributed to nonDoint sources TMDLs could require point source polluters, which are already regulated under state permits, to make further reductions
Total maximum daily loads (TMDLs), an often ignored part of the Clean Water Act, may open the door to regulation of nonpoint sources.
if certain pollutant levels exceed state limits. It is more likely, however, that mostly unregulated nonpoint sources will be targeted— even though state and federal authority to regulate these sources is limited, according to Henry. "We view TMDLs as the basis for a watershed approach," said Henry. Environmentalists agree, saying TMDLs will finally quantify nonpoint source pollution and thus provide a basis for negotiation. The Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund has filed numerous TMDL cases. Joseph Brecher, an attorney
representing the Sierra Club, said his client will push for revocation of any federal permits, such as timber rights, granted to nonpoint sources that show up as major polluters under TMDLs. Oregon regulators, who have used TMDLs for a decade to examine point and nonpoint source pollution S3.id they 3xe already targeting federal lands 3.s one way to curb nonpoint source pollution, but they are also turning to farm management practices and state forestry laws Of the 16 TMDLs completed in Oregon over the past nine years,
TECHNOLOGY Smaller SITE program changes direction EPA's Superfund Innovation Technology Evaluation program (SITE), which verifies performance of remediation technologies, has returned from the brink of extinction with a new focus and operating style. Zeroed out of EPA's 1996 budget, the program has been funded for 1997 at half the 1995 level, said SITE manager Annette Gatchett, and will now take a different tack. Instead of soliciting candidate technologies from manufacturers, beginning this month EPA will ask cleanup site remediators to submit candidate sites and technologies. Gatchett said EPA will match candidate technologies with candidate sites and will require the site remediators to set up the demonstration, something SITE had previously done. But the agency will not change the way it evaluates the technologies, said Gatchett. "We'll write the test plan; we'll go into the field to collect samples; we'll do the analysis; and we'll write the reports." Gatchett said SITE has cancelled its Emerging Technology Program, which funded universities and companies to develop new technologies, because of budget cuts. However, a program to evaluate monitoring and field characterization technologies will still operate as part of SITE this year, she said. SITE will choose only two to four technologies this year, down from seven in 1995, said Gatchett. Since 1986, SITE has evaluated 86 technologies. This year's program will focus on groundwater remediation, said Gatchett, adding that future programs will focus on ecosystem restoration, sediments, and brownfields. —VINCENT LECLAIR
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only two include nonpoint source control programs, said Russell Harding, manager of the watershed section in Oregon's Department of Environmental Quality, because the state has no direct authority to regulate these sources. When the state Department of Environmental Quality decided to limit phosphorus runoff from farms, it turned to the state Department of Agriculture to develop a management plan, he said. Harding also said nonpoint source controls will receive more attention as the state prepares to release an updated list of water bodies not meeting state standards. That list includes increased water temperature, a key problem affecting salmon populations, as a pollutant under the TMDL program. "What's going to really
push us here is that if we don't start controlling nonpoint sources mat affect water temperature, we're heading for a lot of endangered species listings," said Harding. Although Oregon has made TMDLs a major part of its water program, it has completed only two TMDLs per year—a pace dictated by the complexity of the work, said Jim Bloom, who does TMDL modeling for the state. To jumpstart states such as West Virginia, Idaho, and Georgia—which are scrambling to set up TMDL programs and avoid an avalanche of work if the state programs fail, EPA. last year released a database and modeling program BASINS designed specifically to speed up the creation of TMDLs. BASINS developer Russell Kinerson of the Office of Water said
the program contains a database of all U.S. point sources. States can plug point source pollution emissions into the program, then estimate nonpoint pollution levels and background emissions on the basis of water quality monitoring. "The key is having good water quality data," said Kinerson. "The more data you have, the better results you'll get." But Bloom said BASINS may not be the cure-all that EPA was hoping for. He said the TMDL experience in Oregon shows that water bodies require site-specific programs for data collection and analysis. "It's a quantity versus quality issue," said Bloom. "The more pressure we have to crank these things out, the lower the quality will be." VINCENT LECLAIR
White House studies U.S. environmental technology industry, R&D Despite congressional opposition to federal programs that fund industrial research and development, the Clinton administration apparently has not abandoned its interest in environmental technology R&D. This month, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) will complete two studies of U.S. industry that will be used to shape how federal agencies fund and support environmental technology R&D. One study will investigate the structure of environmental research at several international companies with R&D budgets of more than $1 billion. Interviews with corporate management will probe the role of competitive pressures, globalization, and partnerships on corporate environmental decisions and R&D investments. The second study will poll more than 50 small and mediumsized environmental technology firms to find out how they developed and commercialized their products "We really don't have an upto-date view of where industry is going," said David Rejeski of OSTP's Environmental Division, who is coordinating the two studies. "These reports will give us a better sense of where die federal government can play effectively in helping industrial environmental R&D"" Rejeski pointed to fed-
eral-private partnerships and industry-specific initiatives such as the Department of Energy's Industries of the Future Program as possible directions. The corporate study will present profiles of four or five firms—including Intel, Xerox, and DuPont—that are regarded as R&D and environmental leaders, said Rejeski. Researchers led by RAND policy analyst Susan Resetar interviewed corporate management. The profiles will document management's views on environmental R&D investments and the trade-offs of different prevention, control, monitoring, and remediation/restoration technologies. The study conducted by the federally funded Critical Technologies Institute for OSTP will also try to verify the percentage of corporate R&D budgets spent on environmental projects Collaborations between industry and government are of special concern, said Resetar. "We don't have one good model out there for federal-private partnerships." In addition to seeking industry's views of its experience with such collaborations, the report will include an analysis of current federal environmental technology R&D partnership programs. The second study examining environmental technology firms, which is being conducted by the
Environmental Law Institute, takes a more quantitative approach to finding out how technologies are developed in this diverse industry. From a pool of 500 successful firms in five sectors—pollution prevention, monitoring, control, remediation, and energy—50 firms were randomly selected and interviewed with a questionnaire. Roughly half of the firms have annual revenues of less than $10 million. "We've already found a huge difference in how these technologies developed," said the institute's Byron Swift, who directed the study. The questionnaire asked how the ideas behind the technologies originated, how the firms finance their R&D, and how they protect their intellectual property. Rejeski hopes the study will document the extent to which federal support, through either university-sponsored research or research from government laboratories has helped mis technology sector OSTP will use the results of these studies to fine-tune and coordinate policies of the many federal agencies involved in supporting environmental technology, from the National Science Foundation to the Department of Energy. The final reports are expected to be released in June. —STEPHEN COLE
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