Control of Pollutants in Waste Water

Under amendments to the Federal Water Pollution Control Act and Clean Water Act, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is required to restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the nation's waters. A primary task associated with this effort is to eliminate or control the discharge of industrial pollutants in to the nation's waterways. This paper gives an overview of the process that EPA uses to regulate these discharges. The initial implementation of the Federal Water Pollution Control Act (FWPCA) focused on controlling “conventional” pollutants, such as biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) and total suspended solids (TSS). The current implementation strategy for the FWPCA and the Clean Water Act (CWA) is based on control of not only the conventional pollutants, but also on control of toxic organic pollutants, toxic metal pollutants, nonconventional pollutants, or any other pollutants determined to be in the discharge in significant quantities. In controlling these pollutants, EPA gathers technical data, including the results of analyses of waste water samples. For the organic pollutants, nearly all of these data are the result of chromatographic analyses using a variety of detectors. This paper gives details of the connection between the chromatographic processes and the water regulations.