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Water quality laws govern the protection of water resources for human health and the environment. Water quality laws are legal standards or requirements governing water quality, that is, the concentrations of water pollutants in some regulated volume of water. Such standards are generally expressed as levels of a specific water pollutants ...
Environmental cleanup laws govern the removal of pollution or contaminants from environmental media such as soil, sediment, surface water, or ground water.Unlike pollution control laws, cleanup laws are designed to respond after-the-fact to environmental contamination, and consequently must often define not only the necessary response actions, but also the parties who may be responsible for ...
New Source Performance Standards (NSPS) are pollution control standards issued by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The term is used in the Clean Air Act Extension of 1970 (CAA) to refer to air pollution emission standards, and in the Clean Water Act (CWA) referring to standards for water pollution discharges of industrial wastewater to surface waters.
The United States Congress has enacted federal statutes intended to address pollution control and remediation, including for example the Clean Air Act (air pollution), the Clean Water Act (water pollution), and the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA, or Superfund) (contaminated site cleanup).
Nonpoint sources are the most significant single source of water pollution in the United States, accounting for almost half of all water pollution, [1] and agricultural runoff is the single largest source of nonpoint source water pollution. [2] This water pollution has a number of detrimental effects on human health and the environment.
Beginning in the 20th century, designers of industrial and municipal sewage pollution controls typically utilized engineered systems (e.g. filters, clarifiers, biological reactors) to provide the central components of pollution control systems, and used the term "BMPs" to describe the supporting functions for these systems, such as operator training and equipment maintenance.
In 1948 Congress passed the Federal Water Pollution Control Act (FWPCA). [14] The law authorized the Surgeon General and the Public Health Service to develop programs to combat pollution that was harming surface and underground water sources, but did not create any new regulatory or enforcement authority for pollution control. The FWPCA also ...
The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issues Effluent Guideline regulations for categories of industrial sources of water pollution under Title III of the Clean Water Act (CWA). [1] The standards are technology-based, i.e. they are based on the performance of treatment and control technologies (e.g., Best Available Technology ...