Water Pollution

Poor Quality Assurance and Limited Pollutant Coverage Undermine EPA's Control of Toxic Substances Gao ID: PEMD-94-9 February 17, 1994

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) controls toxic pollutant discharges into waterways through seven "core" activities spread across several programs. GAO found that some of the information used to analytically support these activities may be of doubtful quality, raising questions about the effectiveness of these activities in controlling toxic pollutants. GAO also found that the current permit process does not limit the vast majority of toxics being discharged from the nation's factories and sewage treatment plants. Although most of these toxicants are "nonpriority" pollutants, they do pose risks to both human health and aquatic life. GAO tried to examine the implications of uncontrolled pollution cases identified in the facility sample population, but the majority of cases could not be evaluated because of a lack of criteria for assessing the health risks posed by the discharges. This is so for most toxicants discharged across the nation.

GAO found that: (1) 7 EPA activities form the core of EPA efforts to control toxic discharges from point sources into surface waters; (2) 13 types of information are required to analytically support EPA water quality activities, and EPA cannot effectively meet quality assurance requirements or implement strategies for controlling toxic pollutants because 5 of the 7 activities have not implemented the quality assurance procedures necessary to produce accurate information; (3) the permit process is ineffective, and 77 percent of the toxic discharge cases that GAO reviewed were not controlled by permit limits; (4) while most of the discharged toxics are nonpriority pollutants, many of these can pose human health and aquatic life risks; (5) it could not identify the risk implications of many uncontrolled pollution cases because human health or aquatic life risk criteria were lacking; and (6) of the cases that could be evaluated, 8 percent posed human health and aquatic life risks.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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