EPA’s New Waste Water Treatment Standards Development Document Is Hard to Swallow

By Fern Abrams

On January 3, 2001, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed new waste water treatment standards, known as effluent guidelines, for 16 industrial metal products and machinery (MP&M) sectors, including the manufacture and repair of printed wiring boards (PWBs). The proposed new guidelines (see Table 1) are quite stringent and are likely to require extensive and costly process modifications in many PWB shops.

EPA, which has a tendency to underestimate the cost of compliance, has estimated the total annualized cost (in 1996 dollars) of compliance for the PWB industry to be $147.1 million or, on average, approximately a quarter million dollars per-facility. In addition, EPA calculates that the costs of complying with the proposed rule will force seven PWB facilities out of business, while an estimated 301, almost 50 percent of all PWB facilities, will have difficulty financing compliance or ongoing business investments as a result of the rule.

While the economic impacts of the rule are frightening, deeper within the documentation are issues of greater concern. Working with the IPC’s Environmental Health and Safety (EHS) steering committee on review of this rule, I sometimes feel like I’m reading a poorly written detective novel.

EPA’s new rule is under-researched, based on inaccurate science and includes questionable processes used to set the new levels. But, in the typical way of the government, they have attempted to hide their poor work under a morass of paper. In this case, formula after formula and table after table is designed to conceal the truth.

The morass of paper is huge. The rule published in the federal register is more than one hundred pages long. Unfortunately, these one hundred pages don’t say much. It’s not until you read the technical development document — more than five hundred pages — that you begin to see a glimmer of how EPA has misrepresented the truth. But to really uncover the truth, you have to wade into the docket, a library-sized room, full of bookshelves full of reports, memos and other papers that constitute the official record for this rulemaking. The index to the docket itself is more than 1,000 pages.

This is what we have uncovered so far about the way EPA sets effluent guidelines:

According to the Clean Water Act, the law under which these regulations are being promulgated, EPA is required to base effluent guidelines on “Best Achievable Technology.” This means the effluent guidelines are not based on the effect facility wastewater has on the environment, but how clean wastewater can be made using existing technology. In addition, the standard requires proposed limits must be “economically achievable.” So to determine achievable limits, EPA assesses the wastewater discharges from the best performers in the industry. At least, that’s what’s supposed to happen. What we found out is that while EPA has complex rules, formulas and explanations for how they set limits, when you keep digging, you find out that if you start with bad data, no matter what you do to it the results are still of questionable quality.

But first let me tell you how EPA sets limits…

First, EPA selects facilities it believes represent the “best performers.” EPA visits those facilities and collects samples of both treated and untreated wastewater. In the case of the PWB industry, EPA visited three plants. According to EPA’s development document, there are 621 PWB facilities. And they felt the appropriate sample number to accurately assess the industry was three facilities, or less than ½ of one percent.

Because EPA was trying to determine what represents the Best Available Technology (BAT), they sampled plants with two different types of treatment systems. When they decided that BAT was precipitation and settling, they were left with only the data from the two plants that currently use precipitation and settling for wastewater treatment.

Then they perform data editing, or what some would call “cherry picking” the data they want to use. While EPA collected more than 29,572 numbers for the entire rule, of which the PWB industry is only one part, they used only 4,102 numbers to actually set effluent guidelines. Over three quarters of the data collected was edited out or not used for the purpose of assessing achievable treatment levels. Why did EPA throw out so much data? Where EPA felt that the data did not really represent an “efficient” treatment system, they edited the data. Keep in mind these “inefficient” treatment systems were present at facilities selected by EPA as representing top performers. Apparently, top performers aren’t good enough for standard setting - any facilities that actually represented a real world system with real world treatment levels may have been excluded for not being good enough.

EPA puts the remaining data through several pages of calculations. First they calculate a facility level long-term average, based on the average of samples collected on four consecutive days. Then they calculate a statistically based facility level variability factor, again based on sampling on four consecutive days. Finally, where they actually have data from more than one facility, they take the median of the facility level long-term averages and the median of the facility variability factors. The product of the two medians is the effluent guideline.

What’s wrong with this? Two things really. First, the method is highly questionable. And, if you feed in bad data, no matter how good the method, the results are still bad.

Regarding the method, there was no attempt to gauge variability from plant to plant to assess what extent a particular plant represented the industry. Instead EPA studied variability where they knew it would be minimized, in four consecutive day samples from the same plant. Furthermore, no attempt was made to adjust the data based on the very small sample size. Usually very small statistical samples are considered to have wide errors of margin.

Okay so the method is bad, but as I hinted earlier, the rule actually has a greater flaw. Buried on pages 10-55 of the development document is the revelation, in the form of a footnote, that some data was transferred from other industries to the PWB effluent limit development calculations. To be totally fair, this issue is alluded to in the rulemaking, but it is not until Chapter 10 of the 500-page development document that the actual details of what EPA did comes to light.

Remember I said EPA only used data from two PWB plants? Well that wasn’t entirely true. Actually, almost all of the PWB data was edited out. So, in the cases for total or amenable cyanide, chromium, copper, lead, zinc, and total sulfides, the data fed into the formulas to determine limits for the PWB industry did not even come from the PWB industry. In order to make up the shortfall in their data collection, EPA "transferred" data from other metal bearing industries such as aircraft, aerospace, bus and truck, hardware, household equipment, motor vehicles, office machines, etc.

What, you may ask, do these industries have in common with PWBs that allowed EPA to use their data to set effluent limits for the PWB industry? EPA says that these facilities were assessed to have wastewater characteristics and wastewater treatment operations essentially the same as the PWB industry. Wanting to evaluate this for myself, I asked EPA where I would find information regarding this assessment. They answered that they are unsure if there is any written documentation of this assessment.

If you are as outraged as I am at EPAs slopply work, here’s what you can do. Over 25 IPC members and staff testified last month (for March publication) at four regional EPA hearings on behalf of the industry. The rule is open for public comment until May 3, 2001. Individual facilities are encouraged to submit their own written comments as a supplement/reinforcement of the industry’s joint comments being prepared by IPC’s Environmental, Health and Safety Steering Committee. Please visit IPC’s website at www.ipc.org/html/fslegilative.htm for more information or feel free to contact me. We can defeat this rule, but we need your help. Don’t depend on other facilities to do the job - we need the cooperation of everyone in the industry!

Fern Abrams is IPC director of environment policy in Washington D.C.

She can be reached at 202-638-6219, or e-mail .

Table 1

PWB Effluent Guidelines

(in mg/l)

Regulated
Parameter / Current Standards Under d433 / Pretreatment standards for existing sources / New source performance standards
Maximum
Daily / Maximum
Monthly Average / Maximum
Daily / Maximum
Monthly
Average
/ Maximum
Daily / Maximum
Monthly
Average
TSS / 60 / 31 / 60 / 31 / 28 / 18
O&G / 52 / 26 / 52 / 26 / 15 / 12
TOC
(as indicator) / 101 / 67 / 101 / 67
TTO/TOP / 2.13 / 9.0 / 4.3 / 9.0 / 4.3
Cadmium / 0.11 / 0.07
Chromium / 2.77 / 1.71 / 0.25 / 0.14 / 0.17 / 0.07
Copper / 3.38 / 2.07 / 0.55 / 0.28 / 0.01 / 0.01
Cyanide (T)1 / 1.2 / 0.65 / 0.21 / 0.13 / 0.21 / 0.13
Cyanide (A)2 / 0.14 / 0.07 / 0.14 / 0.07
Lead / 0.69 / 0.43 / 0.04 / 0.03 / 0.04 / 0.03
Manganese / 1.3 / 0.64 / 0.29 / 0.18
Nickel / 3.98 / 2.38 / 0.30 / 0.14 / 1.9 / 0.75
Silver / 0.43 / 0.24
Sulfide (as S) / 31 / 13 / 31 / 13
Tin / 0.31 / 0.14 / 0.09 / 0.07
Zinc / 0.38 / 0.22 / 0.08 / 0.06

1Total Cyanide

2Amenable Cyanide

Notice of Proposed Rulemaking Page 4