EPAs 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 IPCs Environmental Health and Safety (EHS)
steering committee on review of this rule, I sometimes feel like Im reading a poorly written
detective novel.
EPAs 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 dont say much. Its 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, thats
whats 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 EPAs 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 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 arent 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.
Whats 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 wasnt 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, heres 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 industrys joint
comments being prepared by IPCs Environmental, Health and Safety Steering Committee. Please visit
IPCs 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. Dont 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 fabrams@ipc.org.

Table 1
PWB Effluent Guidelines
(in mg/l)
Current
Standard
s Under
433
Max
Maxi
Regulated
i
mum
Parameter
m
Mont
u
hly
m
Avera
Dail
ge
y
TSS
60
31
O&G
52
26
TOC
(as indicator)
TTO/TOP
2.13
Cadmium

0.11

Chromium
2.77
Copper
3.38
1
Cyanide (T)
1.2
Cyanide (A)2
Lead
0.69
Manganese
Nickel
3.98
Silver
0.43
Sulfide (as S)
Tin
Zinc
1
Total Cyanide
2
Amenable Cyanide

Pretreatment
standards
for existing
sources
Maxi
m
u
m
Daily

Maxim
um
Monthl
y
Averag
e

60
52

31
26

New source
performanc
e standards
Maximu
Maxi
m
mum Monthl
Daily
y
Average
28
15

18
12

101

67

101

67

9.0

4.3

9.0

4.3

0.25
0.55
0.21
0.14
0.04
1.3
0.30

0.14
0.28
0.13
0.07
0.03
0.64
0.14

0.17
0.01
0.21
0.14
0.04
0.29
1.9

0.07
0.01
0.13
0.07
0.03
0.18
0.75

31
0.31
0.38

13
0.14
0.22

31
0.09
0.08

13
0.07
0.06

0.07
1.71
2.07
0.65
0.43
2.38
0.24

Notice of Proposed Rulemaking

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