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US supreme court weakens rules on discharge of raw sewage into water supplies
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2025
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I haven't read the exact statutes, so take what I say with a grain of salt.
Some compounds, like phosphates and nitrates, are well studied, and so experts can put limits in place that they know will result in good outcomes. Unfortunately, there are an infinite number of potential contaminates someone could dump into a body of water, so for anything less well studied, it's really hard to make limits. The EPA apparently just set a backstop that said something along the lines of "whatever you put in the water has to still result in good water quality".
Now that the Supreme Court has shut that down, a polluter can put anything in the water that isn't specifically disallowed. For a (fake) example, maybe Forever Chemical x2357-A is shown to hurt wildlife at concentrations over 2 parts per billion (after lots of expensive, taxpayer funded research), so the EPA rules that they have to keep it below 2 ppb. The company could adjust their process so their waste is Forever Chemical x2357-B instead, and they can release as much as they want.
The EPA basically just gets forced to play whack-a-mole spending lots of money to come up with specific rules to the point that they can't actually do their jobs.