New Report: Wasting Our Waterways Highlights Industrial Toxic Pollution

In 2012, industrial facilities released 206 million pounds of toxic chemicals to American waterways, telling the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency how much of which chemicals they put into streams, lakes, rivers and ponds through the EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) system.

Our new analysis of that data, Wasting Our Waterways, shows which watersheds were most affected by chemicals that have negative impacts on both the environment and human health, and suggests a great deal remains to be done to fulfill the promise of the Clean Water Act.

When Congress passed the act (over a Nixon veto) in 1972, it wrote into the law the expectation that toxic chemical releases from industry would cease entirely by 1985. Nearly 30 years later, that has not happened.

• Our nation’s iconic waterways are still threatened by toxic pollution – with polluters discharging chemicals into the following watersheds: Great Lakes (8.39 million pounds), Chesapeake Bay (3.23 million pounds), Upper Mississippi River (16.9 million pounds), and Puget Sound (578,000 pounds), among other national treasures.
• Polluters released toxic chemicals to 850 local watersheds across the country. Indiana led the nation in total volume of toxic releases to waterways, with more than 17 million pounds of discharges from industrial facilities, followed by Texas and Louisiana. The top 10 states for toxic industrial releases to waterways were the same as in 2010.
• Watersheds receiving the highest volumes of toxic pollution were the Lower Ohio River-Little Pigeon River (Indiana, Illinois and Kentucky), the Upper New River (Virginia) and the Middle Savannah River (Georgia and South Carolina).

But we can address these and other related problems, including harmful repercussions for wildlife and people, if policymakers:

• require the use of safer alternatives to toxic chemicals,
• expand reporting requirements to more industries (including the oil and gas industry) and more chemicals (including fracking fluids and drilling waste), and
• ensure the public is informed about release and storage of toxic chemicals, with information that is both accurate and complete.