ES 105 Final Exam- Pollution+drinking water+Hudson

Land cover

The physical characteristics of the land surface, such as agriculture, forest, or concrete.

Land use

Activities taking place on land, such as growing food, cutting trees, or building cities.

Clean Water Act

Primary federal law governing water pollution

Regulates the discharge of pollution into “waters of the United States”

Regulates quality standards for surface waters

EPA can implement control programs such as setting waste water standards for industry.

Safe Drinking Water Act

Covers all water designated or potentially used for drinking water (both surface and groundwater)

No authority over private wells

EPA sets enforceable standards for health related drinking water contaminants

Bottled water not covered by SDWA

What is the Las Vegas drinking water system?

They get their water from the Colorado River via lake Mead and 10% of their water comes from groundwater. The river and lake Mead is under severe drought. The lake cannot provide all of the water it used to. The Las Vegas people drink their pee. They have return flow credits. Every gallon of sewage water is sent to the lake and allows them to take 1 more gallon than they are allowed. They clean the water in almost the same way that we treat our wastewater here.

Contamination

The presence of a substance where it should not be or at concentrations above background levels.

Pollution

contamination that results in or can result in adverse biological effects to resident communities

All pollutants are contaminants but not all contaminants are pollutants.

Rachel Carson

American marine biologist, writer, and conservationist whose sea trilogy and book Silent Springs are credited with advancing marine conservation and the global environmental movement.

Point-source

Single identifiable source

Non-point-source

Pollution from diffuse sources (polluted runoff, stormwater runoff, urban streets, suburban development, cropland, animal feedlot)

Have large improvements of water quality happened?

Not very much. Pristine aquatic habitats not long exist.

Leading cause of impairments by miles of river and streams are…

Turbidity, temperature, pathogens, mercury, nutrients, metals ,sediment, PCBs, oxygen depletion, habitat alteration.

Leading causes of impariment by acres of lakes, reservoirs, and ponds are…

oil and grease, PCBs, oxygen depletion, MERCURY!!, Algae, turbidity, sediment, and nutrients.

Bioaccumulation + where does it occur

accumulation of toxic chemical in tissue of organism. Occurs within organism.

Biomagnification + where does it occur

higher concentration of chemical the higher the organism is on the food chain. Occurs between trophic levels.

What are PBTs

persistent, bioaccumulative, and toxic chemicals

Ecotoxicology

study of toxic effects of nautral or synthetic pollutants on constituents of ecosystems

Types of pollutants

1) Nutrients

2) Organic wastes

3) Man-made organic chemicals

4) Heavy metals

5) Mining activities

6) Contaminants of emerging concern

Nutrients as pollution

Alters ecosystem dynamics and is very widespread.

Agriculture is the leading source of water quality impairment in the USA

• 72% of water pollution in rivers is due to agriculture

• From fertilizers and pesticides

Organic Wastes as pollution

Waste water, sewage, and landfill

animal manure

US produces a billion Megatons of manure a year

“modern” manure often contains higher salts, metals, and antibiotics

Black River Manure Spill

• 2005- Marks Dairy Farm in Lowville, NY

• 4-8 million gallons of liquid manure released from a lagoon( 6 olympic sized swimming pools)

• 20 miles stretch of river

• Killed ~375,000 fish

Man-made and organic chemicals as pollutants

• Halocarbons and DDT

• Chlorinated compounds (PCBs-used for plastics

• Pesticides/herbicides(heavy metals in them)

• Hydrocarbons

Hydrocarbons

Organic chemical compound that forms the basis of crude oil, natural gas, coal, and other energy sources

Contaminants of Emerging Concern as pollutants

Plastics

Personal Care Products

Pharmaceuticals

Antibiotics

Endocrine Disrupters

Road Salt

Plastics as pollutant

• Don’t readily break down

• Microplastics

• Sewage systems can’t filter microplastics

Bisphenol A (BPA)

Endocrine (hormone) disrupter linked to:

Thyroid function

Obesity

Neurological Disorders

Pharmaceuticals as pollutants

Lakes all over Minnesota artful of endocrine disrupters, estrogen, antibiotics, metabolites, cocaine, caffeine, etc

Frogs on birth control

Superfund

• Federal program for primarily legacy polluted sites which are pollutants that stay around a long time and were discharged over a long period of time. 

• Typically large sites that require multi-year remediation.

• Lead entity can vary between:

  • EPA(responsible party no longer exists or the EPA does not feel that they can handle it)

  • Multi-party (with agency oversight: lots of different agencies that were responsible for the pollution and have to work together to clean it)

  • Single-party (with agency oversight)

Background on superfund

Passed in 1980 as part of CERCLA (Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability act)

Polluter pays principle wither directly or through litigation or by taxpayer when polluter doesn't exist anymore or can’t be traced.

Consent decree

•  a legal document that is signed by a judge and is negotiated between EPA and the responsible party that guides how the party will clean up the site.

• Part of superfund process

The Superfund Process:

site discovery→ site evaluation→ NPL listing→ Remedial investigation→ Feasibility Study→ Proposed Plan→ Remedy Selection→ Remedial Design(RD)→ Remedial Action (RA)→ Operation and Maintenance→ NPL Deletion 

Aspects of remedial investigation part of superfund process:

• Sampling (typically lots of sampling)

  • Data analysis to understand

    • Geology, geomorphology, and history on the site (ie site conditions)

    • Nature and extent of contamination

• Reach an understanding

• Potential limitation of the data

• Potential challenges on the site

• Conceptual site model 

Feasibility Study:

Evaluate your remedial alternatives

• In river(sediment)

• Dredging

• Capping

• In Situ stabilization

• Natural recovery

  • Landslide (soils/groundwater)

• Pump and treat (contaminated groundwater plume and put up a bunch of wells, treating all the water you pump and discharging it back)

• Excavation

• In Situ stabilization

• Natural recovery

• Bioremediation (pumping bugs into subsurface to encourage breakdown of chemicals)

Environmental Model:

Representation of the system

• Can include water movement, air, chemical fate, and biology.

• Most entities want some assurance that the path they are choosing is the right path

• No such thing as being able to dredge without exposing more sediment into the water column

Things to Consider when Selecting a Remedial Alternative:

• Implementability

• Effective

• Cost(one of the first laws put into place that required EPA to consider cost. If you don’t consider cost, you could pick something that looks great but is so expensive that its cost outweighs the benefits)

• Stakeholder-but in (including Agency)

• Typically focused on an “optimized solution”

Constituent of concern and responsible party of Upper Hudson Superfund Site

• PCBs

• General Electric- potentially responsible party (PRP)

PCBs Polychlorinated Biphenyls 

• We made PCBs and put them into the river

• PCBs are hydrophobic organic chemicals

• PCBs are mostly absorbed to the sediment (mud) in the river)

• Now we are cleaning them out of the river

If we can remediate the sediment, we can fix the river. 

What phase is the Hudson now in?

operation and mantainance

Who is involved in Hudson River superfund cleanup?

Engineers

Geologists

Biologists

Chemists

Mathematicians

Dredging Operator

Boat Captains

Construction Workers

Lawyers

Environmental Dredging

Cleaning up the PCBs without disturbing too much.

• Removing clean sediment is not necessary and costs money

• Dredging disturbs fish and habitat

What happens after dredging?

Habitat restoration

Long term monitoring

In areas of delineated habitat, the design included backfill and planting to restore the habitat

Long term monitoring of fish will also be conducted

The responsible party has to monitor the Hudson in perpetuity

Classes of ECs: Personal Care Products

Triclosan

caffeine

Nonylphenols

How do endocrine disrupters affect people

natural or human-made chemicals that mimic, block, or interfere with the body’s hormones which are in the endocrine system.

Potentially cause some thyroid issues too.

uses of Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAs)

Large group of non-stick chemicals that sed widely in industrial applications, such as firefighting foam, nonstick pans, paper, and textile coatings.

Endocrine disruption on wildlife:

Expressed as testicular oocytes in smallmouth bass and plasma vitellogenin to assess intersex in fish in Chesapeake bay watershed

the occurrence of intersex is positively correlated with nearby pesticides application, percent cultivated land and number of septic tanks

Hormone treatment at Experimental Lake 260:

Lake Canada where they put estrogen in the water to see what the effects of that would be.

Estrogen application process in Experimental Lake 260

• Before-and-after control-impact design to determine both direct and indirect effects of the synthetic estrogen used in the birth control pill, 17 alpha-ethynylestradiol (EE2)

• Abundance and biomass of the Young-of Year and adults fathead minnow, slimy sculpin and lake trout 

What happened with the vultures in Southeast Asia

Vultures who ate animals that were treated with diclofenac would die within a couple of days so the vultures nearly went extinct. Diclofenac in India was banned to save the vultures but they have not banned it in the EU and now some of the vultures in Spain are dying.

What does Inadequate treatment of the pharmaceutical manufacturing effluent and its irresponsible disposal and Antibiotic manufacturing plants leads to

• unprecedented antibiotic contamination in the environment and their persistence presence in the environment and their persistent presence in the environment significantly modulates the bacterial genomes 

• Antibiotic resistance

Affect of pesticide glyphosate

 big effects on reproduction and is associated with early onset Parkinsins. 

Affect of pesticide neonicotinoid:

Not harmful to people but killing the bees

What accounts for more than 90% of annual hormone releases?

Elevated flows of a few days per year that overwhelm wastewater treatment plants.

Factors leading to changes in Eosin wastewater effluent

Regulations

Plant Upgrades

Market Forces

Tertiary Treatment of Wastwater

• Ultrafiltration

• UV

• Ozonation

What to remember about ECs

Many ECs are unregulated

Wastewater Treatment Plants are an important source

ECs can have non toxic effects such as endocrine disruption

Heavy metals as pollutants

Sources: Industrial wastes, mines, agriculture, use of coal and other mined material

Can be toxic to plants and animals

Many of them bioaccumulate and biomagnify

Very immobile in soils—> difficult to remove

Mining activities as a pollutant source

Sources: smelters, coal fired power plants, and atmospheric deposition

Usually involve heavy metals

Acid mine drainage

Ways to solve watershed pollution

• Reduce impervious surfaces

• protect wetlands /riparian zones

• bioswales,rain gardens, green roofs

• Bioremediation

• Nets and catchment

• Permeable paver

• Brine solution(23% salt), salt/sand mixture coffee grinds??

Hypoxia

Areas of low oxygen

Anoxia

Areas of no oxygen

Deoxygenation

Hypoxia and anoxia, les oxygen produced and dissolved in the water.

Phytoplankton inefficiency

A result of eutrophication and thermal expansion

Lost 2% of Oxygen in ocean in 50 years