The Clean Water Act
Enacted in 1948 and amended in 1972, the EPA's Clean Water Act is a crucial legislation that mandates industrially contaminated water to be discharged using the best available methods by following strict EPA guidelines.
Despite this, most industrially contaminating water organizations still use chemicals and filtration processes that are environmental pollutants. This led EPA to a $1.18 billion settlement in June 2023 with three chemical companies for polluting drinking water.
SOURCES OF WATER POLLUTION
Environmental & Industrial pollutants
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The primary industries that contaminate freshwater are chemical production facilities, petrochemical refineries, electrical generating facilities, mining operations, agricultural runoff from livestock ranches, fertilizer/pesticide runoff from farmlands, domestic sewage treatment, urban runoff, and saltwater intrusion resulting from increasing dependency onshallow aquifers in coastal regions.
The types of contaminants found in polluted water include, among many other things, organic matter, pathogens, microbial contaminants, nutrients, salts, acids, heavy metals, toxic organic compounds, silt, and suspended particulate matter. As a result, the water treatment industry created a wide array of treatment processes with questionable outcomes, not safeguarding the environment and human health. This caused policymakers to question their efficiency and effectiveness when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that more than 7.2 million Americans suffer from waterborne illnesses annually.