Local Phosphorus “Hot Spots” From Trading in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, and Lack of Transparency and Accuracy in Pennsylvania’s Reporting System
Washington, D.C. – With Maryland Governor Larry Hogan’s Administration proposing new regulations to allow pollution trading next month, a new report by the Environmental Integrity Project on wastewater treatment plants documents how pollution credit swaps in Virginia and Pennsylvania contribute to local pollution “hot spots” and reduce accountability.
Pollution trading in Virginia, for example, has hurt water quality in the Shenandoah River system, which is overloaded with phosphorus pollution and algae. Because of trading, the state allowed the Strasburg Sewage Treatment Plant to release 2,942 pounds of phosphorus, more than three times its permitted limit, into the North Fork of the Shenandoah, which already has excessive levels of the nutrient from farm manure runoff. And trading also allowed the Front Royal Wastewater Treatment Plant to dump 9,146 pounds of phosphorus into the Shenandoah, more than twice its permitted limit.
“The problem with pollution trading systems is that they can undermine accountability for polluters and create worse contamination in local waterways,” said Eric Schaeffer, director of the Environmental Integrity Project and former Director of Civil Enforcement at EPA. “In theory, these systems are supposed to help the efficiency of the overall Chesapeake Bay cleanup. But in practice, we’ve found they are often poorly designed and can cause more harm than traditional enforcement of individual Clean Water Act permits.”
Beyond the issue of pollution trading, EIP’s new report reveals that 21 wastewater plants across the Chesapeake Bay watershed violated their permit limits last year by releasing excessive amounts of nitrogen or phosphorus pollution.
The report uses public records to document 12 Maryland sewage plants, which treat more than half of the state’s wastewater, in violation of their permit limits last year, including facilities in Salisbury, Frederick, and Westminster.
In West Virginia, six wastewater plants violated their permit limits in 2016; in Pennsylvania, two did; and in New York, one.
The largest permit violations in the bay watershed last year came from Baltimore’s Patapsco Wastewater Treatment Plant – the second largest in Maryland – which discharged 3.7 million pounds of nitrogen pollution last year, four times its permit limit. The violations continued into 2017, with the plant by August already releasing more than twice as much nitrogen as permitted for the entire year, records show.
“While upgrades to sewage treatment plants have proven to be the most successful method of cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay, a few plants – including Baltimore’s Patapsco plant – have improvements that are behind schedule and deserve increased oversight from state regulators,” said Schaeffer.
Baltimore officials have said that a long-delayed $250 million upgrade to the Pataspco sewage plant, due more than three years ago, is scheduled to be complete in the summer of 2018. When finished, this project – when combined with $263 million in recent improvements at Baltimore’s Back River Wastewater Treatment Plant, the state’s largest – Maryland should achieve its goals for the bay cleanup from the wastewater sector.
On the issue of pollution trading, Maryland Governor Hogan’s administration is expected to release new draft regulations on December 8 to allow trading. Pollution trading system allows facilities that want to dump excess pollution into waterways do so, while avoiding legal jeopardy, if they send money (through the purchase of pollution credits) to other wastewater plants or farms that reduce their pollution below levels allowed by the EPA’s Chesapeake Bay cleanup plan.
In both Virginia and Pennsylvania, pollution credit trading systems allowed many wastewater plants that were over their limits in 2016 to buy their way out of violations by purchasing credits.
The EIP report details how Pennsylvania has a problem-riddled pollution credit trading system that makes transparency nearly impossible. The commonwealth’s wastewater plants frequently buy credits to allow them to discharge more pollution, but then the plant operators often fail to report this information to an online enforcement database that allows the public and regulators to tell who is following the rules.
The EIP report provides recommendations on how the bay states could better manage this wastewater pollution, including:
- Pollution trading systems, like those of Virginia and Pennsylvania, should be avoided in Maryland and other states not already employing them because they can lead to reduced accountability and increased local pollution “hot spots.”
- The bay region states should more consistently fine wastewater treatment plants and other polluters that violate their permit limits.
- States that do allow facilities to engage in pollution trading should require the plants to accurately and promptly report, to public databases, credits purchases and their impact.
- EPA should press bay region states, especially Pennsylvania, New York and Delaware, to upgrade more of their large municipal wastewater treatment plants with state-of-the art technology, following the lead of Maryland, the District of Columbia and Virginia.
EIP’s report also reveals that the bay region states have not invested equally in modernizing their municipal sewage plants.
While Maryland has paid about $1.25 billion to upgrade 79 percent of its large municipal sewage plants to enhanced levels since lawmakers passed a “flush tax” law in 2004, Virginia has invested about $800 million to improve 44 percent (40 of 90) of its large municipal sewage plants to similar standards.
In Pennsylvania, most plants have been upgraded to a lower level, with only 4 percent (7 of 189) of the large- to medium-sized municipal sewage treatment plants in the bay watershed of Pennsylvania having enhanced pollution control systems, according to EIP’s report. The District of Columbia region’s one sewage plant – Blue Plains, the bay’s largest – has been upgraded to an enhanced level. In West Virginia, about half (6 out of 13) of wastewater plants have been modernized to this standard, while in New York it is none out of 26 and in Delaware it is zero of three.
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The Environmental Integrity Project is a 15-year-old nonprofit, nonpartisan organization, based in Washington D.C., dedicated to enforcing environmental laws and holding polluters and governments accountable to protect public health.
Media contact: Tom Pelton, Environmental Integrity Project, (443) 510-2574 or tpelton@environmentalintegrity.org
