Category Archives: Contaminants

Discussions of Individual contaminants impacting water

Contaminants

PFAS Rule 2024

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ChemicalMaximum Contaminant Level Goal (MCLG)Maximum Contaminant Level (MCL)
   
PFOA04.0  PPT
PFOS04.0 PPT
PFHxS10 PPT10 PPT
HFPO-DA (GenX Chemicals)10 PPT10 PPT
PFNA10 PPT10 PPT

When the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued the Final Rule on regulation of poly-fluoro alkaline substances (PFAS) last week I had three questions. The first was: “Good grief 4.0 parts per trillion (PPT). Are there analytical methods that can even determine such a low number”. So I hopped on the EPA website and checked out EPA’s Technical Support Documents (TSD) for the new Rule. And yes indeed EPA says analytical methods can detect PFOA and PFOS to 4 PPT.

For purposes of regulation these numbers are referred to as the Minimum Reporting Level (MRL). An MRL is the minimum quantification level EPA has determined can be achieved with specified confidence by a large number of laboratories in the U.S. It is different from the Detection Limit (DL) which a lot of environmental professionals toss around in their daily lingo about sample analysis. Laboratory methods are so sensitive for PFAS chemicals that they can detect even lower levels than EPA is satisfied are actually real results. For those of you who are casual readers of this blog and are not familiar with analytical methods, EPA develops and maintains analytical standards for laboratories to use in testing for chemicals. EPA Methods 533 and 537.1 are required for analysis of the PFAS chemicals in the table above.

The table may look like a whole bunch of alphabet soup to you and you may be wondering what all these chemicals are. I have a previous blog post that you can read if you want to learn a little more about what the popular press have dubbed “Forever Chemicals.” Just check out this link here (https://waterblogger.org/category/contaminants/ ). Originally EPA was only planning on regulating PFOA and PFOS but in 2023 they decided to expand regulation to a couple other PFAS chemicals. Specifically, Hexaflurorpropylene Oxide Dimer Acid (HFPO-DA) and its ammonium salt known as Genx chemicals, Perfluorononanoic acid (PFNA) and Perfluorohexane sulfonic acid (PFHxS). Regulatory limits for drinking water were also placed on these chemicals in the Final Rule.

So my first question was answered. My second question was: “How big a problem is this anyway? Are there really that many drinking water systems out there that are contaminated with PFAS?” The EPA’s TSD supplied the answer to that as well.  Back between 2013 and 2015 EPA required public water systems to conduct PFAS testing under the Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule. Public water systems were monitored semi-annually. The study included all large and very large water systems which serve greater than 10,000 people. EPA found that 2 % of these systems are contaminated with PFOA and PFOS.

My third question was: “Are there any technologies that can actually treat drinking water to these very low levels of 4 PPT? And how much is this all going to cost?” Indeed the TSD confirmed that there are a number of technologies that can treat PFAS chemicals to reach those levels.

There are three main treatment technologies that can treat drinking water to the new MCLS: Granular Activated Carbon (GAC), Ion Exchange, and Reverse Osmosis/Nano Filtration

GAC uses a specially preprepared carbon media such as lignite or wood to adsorb contaminants from water. GAC media has the unique distinction among these technologies of being reuseable. Ion exchange employs an ion bead resin treated with an anion (typically chloride) as the media to exchange a strong bonding ion (fluoride in the case of PFAS) in water for a weaker one (chloride). Unfortunately the media once depleted has to be disposed of as a hazardous waste. Reverse Osmosis removes contaminants through forcing water through a membrane at high pressure. There are two effluents produced from the process. One is the treated water and the other is a brine which must be disposed of. The spent media can’t be reused and also has to be disposed of.

Another option was looked at too. Just replace the contaminated drinking water with a different source. This could mean switching to a surface water source if you have contaminated groundwater or drilling outside of the contaminated area for groundwater replacement.

Cost for the different treatment systems was calculated for both the capital cost of constructing the system and for annual operation and maintenance costs. Below are approximate costs that I attempted to ferret out from the graphs EPA provided in their TSD. Everything is in 2022 dollars so add on the annual inflation costs if you must.

The cheapest thing to do of course, if it is available to you, is to replace your drinking water source. Capital costs are estimated to be about $500K to $4M for capital costs and $5K to $100K annually for operation and maintenance.

Treatment SystemCapital CostOperation & Maintenance Cost
   
GAC Large System$5 – $100 M$100 K – $10 M
GAC Small System$100K – $1 M$10K – $100K
Ion Exchange Large System$2M – $100 M$100K – $10 M
Ion Exchange Small System$100K – $1M$10K – $100K
Reverse Osmosis/Nanofiltration Large System$5M – $100M$200K – $12M
Reverse Osmosis/Nanofiltration Small System$1M – $3M$70K – $200K

All three of my questions answered. Yes these very low MCLs for PFAS in the new Rule can be analyzed for using EPA Methods 533 and 537.1, yes there are a good number (2 %) of public water systems that are contaminated with PFAS, and yes there are treatment technologies that can achieve MCLs, although it looks like they are pretty costly. If you have questions about the new Rule, please feel free to reach out to me and I will see if I can provide you with an answer from EPA’s lengthy documentation.

Contaminants

PFAS in Water

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PFAS is the new “It” organic chemical contaminant.  You hear about it in newspapers, in magazines, at environmental conferences and wherever environmental professionals gather to talk.  PFAS is not just one organic chemical but a whole suite of related organic chemicals and the acronym stands for per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances.  There are dozens of these chemicals but in water only the per-fluoralkyl substances are important.

          The per-fluoroalkyl substances are chain like structures composed of a series of bonded carbon and fluorine atoms attached to a charged ion.  Scientists call the carbon and fluorine atoms the “tail” and the charged ions the “head”.  There are two main types of per-fluoroalkyl substances:  per-fluoroalkyl acids and per-fluoroalkyl sulfonamides.  Scientists, seemingly in order to confuse everyone, have given the per-fluoroalkyl acids the acronym PFAAs. 

          The two PFAAs which give us the most trouble are per-fluoroalkyl carboxylic acid and per-fluoroalkane sulfonic acids.  Of the per-fluoroalkyl carboxylic acids the one’s that are detected most in water are PFOA or per-fluorooctanoic acid and its cousin per-fluorooctanoate.  Of the per-fluoroalkane sulfonic acids, the ones that are detected most often are PFOS or per-fluorooctane sulfonate and per-fluorooctane sulfonic acid.    

          I know this is a jumble of acronyms and chemical names.  Here’s a handy cheat sheet to keep them all straight.

Cheat Sheet

          Really the only chemicals you need to remember are PFOA and PFOS, because they are basically non-degradable.  Yes that’s right, they are not degradable.  They are with us forever. Scientists even call them “terminal PFAS” or “terminal degradation products”.  The carbon fluorine bond is so strong that it is impossible to break it apart through natural degradation processes existing in our environment.  There are plenty of other PFAAs too.  But they are not generally found in water as they degrade into the “terminal PFAS.”  Ditto for the poly-fluoroalkyl substances. 

          There are lots of different PFAS that have been manufactured over the last 80 years.  As a result, PFOA and PFOS are found everywhere.  They are in the air, the soil, the water, the fish, the plants, and your blood.  In one study in 2015 supported by the Red Cross (authored by G.W. Olsen and others) a set of 616 blood donor’s plasma samples, representing the general U.S. population, was analyzed for PFAS.   Researchers reported PFOA levels of 1.1 micrograms per liter in the blood donor’s plasma and 4.3 micrograms per liter of PFOS.   Why in the world would anyone produce something like this and why in the world is it so ubiquitous in the environment?  This stuff is even found in the Arctic and Antarctic.    

          PFAS are chemicals that repel oil and water and reduce friction.  They have been used in non-stick cookware and in protective sprays to prevent spills and stains on carpets and upholstery.  They are also used in firefighting and firefighting training at airports and military bases because they can put out a jet fuel fire.  PFAS have been manufactured since the 1940’s.  The chemicals were never reviewed under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) because the law which was written in 1976 only required review and approval of new chemicals.  TSCA was rewritten to fix this loophole in 2016.  The U.S. Environmental Agency (U.S. EPA) worked with companies to phase out the manufacture of the problem PFAS chemicals back in 2002 so presumably new contamination sources no longer exist.

          The “terminal PFAS” – PFOA and PFOS – have a wide distribution in the environment because of the chemical nature of PFAS.  Remember the “tail” of bonded carbon and fluorine?  That tail acts to repel water and oil.  Remember the “head” of charged ions?  It mixes with water.  How crazy is that?  But these are the properties that this chemical was made for; it’s why those no stick pans in your kitchen work so well and clean up like a breeze.  But where this chemical has been spilled or disposed of in our environment, it results in all sorts of weird activity.   Where it is found in the vadose zone (the unsaturated area of soils and rock before groundwater is encountered) the “tail” properties cause it to attach to organic carbon and other organic contaminants in the soils.  At the same time, its negatively charged “head” repels the negatively charged soils.  This makes the “head” free and available for mixing with water.  During and after a rainfall, water percolating through the vadose zone attaches to the “head” and drags the chemical down into the groundwater zone below with it.  Unless you get rid of the PFAS in the vadose zone, you have an ever present source for water contamination.

          Once PFAS moves into the groundwater, it moves fast because PFAS’s chemical properties give it high solubility and low retardation in the aqueous environment.  Groundwater can discharge into surface water, and before you know it, PFAS is down the river.  If you have a private or public well into groundwater near a PFAS spill or disposal area then it can get into your drinking water.  Drinking PFAS is not good for your health.  In 2016, the U.S. EPA set a drinking water health advisory for PFAS.  It is 70 parts per trillion.  This is a very, very small number and is based on protection of fetuses and breast fed infants.  Fortunately the EPA surveyed 4064 public water supplies individuals in the U.S. and found only a small number to be contaminated with PFAS.  Most of these systems are near manufacturing plants where PFAS was made and released into the environment or near military bases and airports where firefighting training has occurred.

          Quite a bit of research has been conducted over the past 10 years on PFAS and its’ interactions in the environment, including on-going studies into the complexities of the chemical’s interactions in the natural environment.  I’m always floored by the fact that scientists are doing the research on these interactions years after a chemical was first developed and put into use.  This is not the first time this has occurred.  Fifteen years ago the “It” organic chemical contaminant was MTBE or Methyl tert-Butyl Ether.  MTBE replaced lead in gasoline as far back as 1988.  What nobody bothered to look at back then was what chemical properties MTBE might have that would interact in a poor manner with the environment after it leaked from underground storage tanks at gas stations.  Like PFAS, MTBE is highly soluble in water.   And like PFAS it forms big plumes moving from the source of contamination through the groundwater to reach drinking water wells and surface water.  MTBE though, unlike PFAS, is readily degradable in the environment.   

          Failure to examine a chemical’s interactions with the environment prior to its widespread use has resulted in an entire industry of environmental remediation where costly soil removals and large scale groundwater recovery systems have to be installed and maintained.  The costs of such remediation can be exorbitant and the desire to recover these costs as well as damages for the contamination has led to lawsuits against chemical manufacturers and corporations using the chemicals.      

Contaminants

Copper and Water Quality

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A few of my readers know that I’m a sailor. My husband and I have a 32 foot sailboat, which we keep it in a marina on the Chesapeake Bay. Every year the boat gets hauled out of the water for the winter. Before the boat went back in the water this year, we had the hull painted. Copper based paints are used on boat hulls to prevent the growth of critters and sprouts. I was curious about how copper paints prevent your hull from becoming a Noah’s ark of algae and barnacles, so I have been doing a little reading on the subject. There have been a number of copper based paint studies (also grandly called Anti Fouling Systems) conducted by the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the California Environmental Protection Agency (Cal-EPA). According to the two environmental organizations, the most commonly used boat paints leach copper into the water and form a toxic protective shield around the boat hull to prevent the attachment of aquatic organisms. Copper is a toxin for many aquatic plants and animals. In fact it is a toxin for many terrestrial plants and animals. Copper is a widely used pesticide in the agricultural industry where it’s employed to eliminate bacteria, fungus, and weeds.  After a few years, the leaching rate of copper from the paint on a boat hull decreases and the boat has to be painted once again. It costs a couple of thousand dollars every time, so this is not an incidental expense.

 

The most common form of copper in the antifouling paints is cuprous oxide.  I didn’t realize how much copper is actually in the paint. Cuprous oxide paint is 30 to 60 percent copper. So a lot of copper is going into the water in marinas where recreational boats spend most of their time. The Navy actually did some studies in San Diego Bay back in the 1990s and found that 98 % of the copper in the bay came from antifouling paints on boats. They calculated that each boat in the bay was releasing 1.8 pounds of copper a year just while they were sitting at the dock in the marina. According to the Navy, most of the copper in the paint was released through the leaching process. A smaller amount of copper was released during underwater cleaning of boat hulls. California does seem to have the largest problem with copper in the waters of their marinas, so much so that a marina in California has been listed as an impaired water body under 303(d) of the Clean Water Act. Once a water body is listed as impaired under the Clean Water Act, a state must institute a Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) for it. A TMDL basically sets the maximum amount of a particular pollutant that a water body can receive and still meet water quality standards. As you can imagine, the designation of the marina as an impaired water body has now posed a serious problem for the marina’s boaters and California’s environmental regulators. Since hull paint is considered the main contributor of copper into the marina’s waters, the Cal-EPA has instituted a study of alternate antifouling systems – hull coatings without copper – in hopes of finding one which will be effective and economical enough to be used on recreational boats so that water quality there can be improved.

 

The water quality criteria established by the EPA for copper in marine waters and estuaries is really quite low. It has been revised multiple times over the last 20 years. The revisions have sought to produce a more scientifically justified approach for the development of the water quality criteria. The latest approach in setting the copper water quality criteria was issued in the July 2016 draft guidance: Aquatic Life Ambient Estuarine/Marine Water Quality Criteria for Copper, EPA-822-P-16-001. Scientists at EPA have known for many years that the toxicity of copper in water is dependent upon the water’s salinity (the amount of dissolved solids in the water), the temperature, the pH (the measure of acidity), and the amount of natural dissolved organic carbon. EPA scientists realized variations in these parameters influence the amount of dissolved copper in water. Dissolved copper is the culprit in the metal’s toxicity to aquatic organisms. Toxicity is reduced when copper in the aquatic environment binds with other elements and organic carbon to form ligands. Ligands are a little difficult to understand but simply put, they are complexes of molecules binding together to form a new substance. So for example, if there’s a lot of natural dissolved carbon in the water, it might bind with copper to form a ligand. Copper can also form complex ions with other ions and ligands in the water. Copper tied up in ligands and complex ions is not available to plants and critters, thereby making the water less toxic to them.

 

Interestingly copper has a similar binding behavior when it interacts with aquatic organisms. It binds to the biota’s gills and surface membranes. Although biota also ingests copper in the water, the scientists at EPA do not consider it a pathway for the toxin to negatively impact the organisms. It is the binding of copper to the gills and surface membranes of marine fish and invertebrates which is the major factor in coppers toxicity to them. EPA has a name for it. They call it the biotic ligand. Therefore to take into account the complexity of the world at large which is obviously not a simple system, EPA has developed a model called the “Biotic Ligand Model” to determine based on the specific temperature, pH, salinity, and amount of dissolved carbon what the aquatic criteria is for any particular marine or estuarine environment you might encounter. This makes it a little tough for state regulators because then they must sample the waters in question for these parameters and run a complex computer model to determine the specific water quality criteria for any given water body.

 

When setting water quality criteria, EPA usually bases it on the organism in the water which is most sensitive to a given pollutant. Arthropods are pretty sensitive to copper, after all the reason boaters use copper paint is to keep barnacles from attaching to their boat hulls. Although in the grand scheme of things I don’t think anybody is really worried about barnacles. Commercial species of mollusks like mussels, oysters and abalone are also extremely sensitive to copper. EPA was able to collect acute toxicity data on 89 different estuarine and marine fish and invertebrates. In simple terms acute toxicity means that biota aren’t going to live very long when exposed to an acutely toxic concentration of a pollutant. There were far less data available on chronic toxicity. Chronic toxicity happens when exposure to a pollutant results in conditions which are not immediately fatal to an organism, for example reproductive anomalies (we call these birth defects).

 

With EPA’s Biotic Ligand Model one can pop the temperature, pH, dissolved carbon and salinity values of your local marine/estuarine water into the model and come up with a numeric value for copper which should not be exceeded. So for example, if your water is 68 degrees Fahrenheit, the pH is 8, the dissolved carbon is 1.0 milligram per liter, and salinity is 32 parts per thousand than dissolved copper shouldn’t exceed 2.0 micrograms per liter on average more than once every 3 years, and the 4 day average shouldn’t exceed 1.3 micrograms of dissolved copper per liter more than once every 3 years. Complicated right?

 

These are extremely low values. The current acute value for copper is 3.1 micrograms per liter and the chronic is 4.8. The water quality criteria are of course guidelines. They are not regulatory in nature. They are there for state regulators to use in determining protection measures for aquatic life. As mentioned above, California has already designated a San Diego area marina as an impaired water body. Other places EPA has suggested might have copper levels impacting aquatic life are certain locations within the Chesapeake Bay and some port areas of Florida. As of yet, I know of no other marinas which have been designated as impaired waters. Alternatives to copper paint are fairly expensive and can potentially double the price for applying an antifouling coating to a boat hull. The American Coatings Association and the International Copper Association have already commented on EPA’s 2016 draft guidance. The organizations submitted a number of technical comments in regard to the Biotic Ligand Model and the conservative values produced by it. They are worried that the new proposed copper water quality criteria will result in unrealistically low TMDLs for other marinas.

Contaminants

Selenium in the Water Environment

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For those of you who enjoyed my previous blog posts on selenium, here’s a little lagniappe for you on the behavior of selenium in the aquatic environment.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, selenium acts a lot like sulfur in that it combines with other elements and organic matter to form different species. (For an explanation of elemental species, here is a link to another post https://waterblogger.org/contaminants/the-mercury-cycle/). In surface waters with a lot of oxygen, you’ll most often find two mineral species called selenite and selanate, which are the result of the combination of selenium with oxygen. Algae and other floating microorganisms in the water are sucking up this stuff, turning it into organic forms of selenium and accumulating it within their teeny weenie little organic structures.

 

Down below the water, you’ll find a lot going on in the dynamic chemical environment of sediment. There’s lots of organic material in sediment with which selenium can combine to form organic selenium species. There are also lots of other elements like iron with which selenium species react. And there are all sorts of microorganisms tooling around looking for a snack. Under these varying conditions of chemical and biochemical activity, selenium is being converted from one selenium species to another.

 

For example, all those microorganisms chowing down on the selenium in sediment frequently methylate it, which forms organic selenium species. (Read the post at the above link, to find out what methylation is). Organic selenium species get processed right into the living structures of the tissues of animals like fish. According to the great compendium of the Toxicological Profile for Selenium published by the Agency for Toxic Substance and Disease Registry (ATSDR), these organic selenium species are similar to the organic sulfur ones used by living organisms in the production of amino acids. In fact, ATSDR says selenium substitutes for sulfur in amino acids. The names for these amino acids are selenocysteine and selenomethionine. Do you remember what amino acids are? They are the building blocks of protein. Protein supports the growth of tissue, muscles, and bones. Neither fish nor we could get along without protein.

 

So those are the mechanisms by which selenium in the aquatic environment enters the food chain. Basically all the little guys like algae and microorganisms that feed on selenium in the water and the sediment are eaten right up by insect larvae, larval fish, clams and mussels, and similar denizens of the aquatic world, which in turn are then eaten up by fish and birds. Voila, a perfect web for selenium poisoning.

Contaminants

Aquatic Life Freshwater Ambient Water Quality Criteria for Selenium

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In my last post on Selenium Contamination

Selenium Contamination

I mentioned that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a draft Aquatic Life Ambient Water Quality Criterion for Selenium in Freshwater in July 2015 (EPA 822-P-15-001). The final rule was published in the Federal Register in July 2016.  EPA has the authority to develop these type of criterion under section 304 (a) (1) of the Clean Water Act. The criteria laid out in EPA’s rule are not regulatory or enforceable until adopted by states as a water quality standard under section 303 (c) (2) of the Clean Water Act.

 

The complexity of how selenium behaves in the water environment had to be taken into account in developing the criterion. If you read my post on Selenium Contamination, you’ll know that the biggest problem with selenium is its chronic long term effects for egg laying animals. Just a tiny amount of selenium in water can get into the food chain through the algae and microbial organisms that live in water, then the invertebrates like insects, worms and so forth eat the algae and microorganisms, and they in turn are consumed by fish. Because fish don’t readily excrete selenium in urine or feces (yes, fish do poop in the water), it winds up in their tissues and it is unfortunately transferred to their offspring while they are being formed as tiny little embryos in eggs. The difference between what is an essential dietary need by fish for selenium and what is toxic to them is very small. Excess selenium ends up severely deforming the baby fish to the point they either don’t hatch or their deformities are so severe they don’t survive after hatching. The whole process of concentrating a contaminant up the food chain from microorganisms to fish and other animals is called bioaccumulation.

 

Selenium requires residency time in water for it to be bioaccumulated. Residency means it stays around in the water for a while. If you have constant low level selenium contamination going into a fast water creek or river, the velocity of that river moves much of the contaminant pretty quickly downstream, so selenium doesn’t have time to sit around and get ingested by a lot of microorganisms. Flowing waters are called lotic. Residency time increases when waters are still, like ponds, lakes and wetlands. The water with the selenium contamination stays around awhile and the microorganisms have plenty of time to suck it up and concentrate it. All the documented cases of selenium poisoning in fish have been in ponds, lakes and wetlands. Still waters are called lentic waters. Residency time is important because it takes awhile for the selenium to build up and concentrate through the food chain.

 

EPA had a tough time coming up with criterion for selenium in water because selenium toxicity depends on the food chain in a water body and if the water is moving or not. Usually scientists just do tank tests to determine water quality criterion. They’ll have one tank full of fish hanging around in contaminated water and another tank of fish, called the control, hanging around in nice clean water. The scientists generally use some abbreviated period of time like 30 days to determine what level of a particular contaminant knocks off the fish in the contaminated tank compared to the clean tank, because most water quality criterion are based on sudden death or acute toxicity not chronic long term toxicity like selenium. And they feed all the fish in the tanks nice clean fish food. There are no algae or invertebrates in the tanks concentrating the contaminant. So instead of doing tank tests, the EPA had to rely on data from laboratory and field studies. Fortunately there are a lot of studies out there, because selenium poisoning in fish has been a well known problem since the 1980’s. EPA was able to find data on a diversity of fish. Usually these studies require the use of a whole host of aquatic organisms, not just fish, because water quality is important to hosting an entire ecosystem, including fish, insects, floating crustaceans, and crawling crustaceans. But because the effects of selenium on fish are so well known and so severe, the EPA just used fish data in development of their criteria.

 

EPA looked at studies to determine what level of selenium in fish tissue and eggs caused toxicity. Then, because EPA had to come up with actual selenium water concentrations that are protective for a whole host of different fish, they got together with the U.S. Geological Survey and developed a model. It’s a complicated regression model, which the two federal agencies used to calculate actual concentration numbers protective of fish in both lotic and lentic waters if they weren’t exceeded in any 30-day period over the course of a year.

 

So, in the table below are EPA’s new Aquatic Life Ambient Water Quality Criterion for Selenium, which sets numerical criterion for selenium in fish tissue in eggs and ovaries and in whole fish or muscle and a monthly average water quality measurement for both moving water (lotic) and still water (lentic), as well as a calculation for determining a water quality criterion for intermittent exposure.

 

Summary of the Draft Freshwater Selenium Ambient Chronic Water Quality Criterion for Protection of Aquatic Life.

Media Type Fish Tissue Water Column3 Criterion
Criterion Element Element Egg/Ovary 1 Fish Whole Body or Muscle 2 Monthly Average Exposure Intermittent Exposure4

Magnitude
Magnitude 15.1 mg/kg 8.5 mg/kg whole body or  11.3 mg/kg muscle (skinless, boneless filet) 1.5 µg/L in lentic aquatic systems

 

3.1 µg/L in lotic aquatic systems

  

𝑾QC int =   𝑾QC 30 day – 𝑾C bkgrnd(𝟏−𝒇int )/ 𝒇int
Duration Instantaneous measurement5

 

 Instantaneous measurement5

 

 30 days Number of days/month with an elevated concentration
Frequency Never to be exceeded Never to be exceeded Not more than once in three years on average

 

 Not more than once in three years on average

 
1. Fish tissue elements are expressed as steady-state.

2. Egg/Ovary supersedes any whole-body, muscle, or water column element when fish egg/ovary concentrations are measured.

3. Fish whole-body or muscle tissue supersedes water column element when both fish tissue and water concentrations are measured.

4. Water column values are based on dissolved total selenium in water and are derived from fish tissue values via bioaccumulation modeling. Water column values are the applicable criterion element in the absence of steady-state condition fish tissue data.

5. Where WQC30-day is the water column monthly element, for either a lentic or lotic waters; Cbkgrnd is the average background selenium concentration, and fint is the fraction of any 30-day period during which elevated selenium concentrations occur, with fint assigned a value ≥0.033 (corresponding to 1 day).

6. Fish tissue data provide instantaneous point measurements that reflect integrative accumulation of selenium over time and space in fish population(s) at a given site.

 

Wow right? This is a pretty complex set of criteria. It is made even more complex by EPA’s allowance for states to modify all of the criterion based on site specific conditions for the exact types of fish species in a particular area instead of the ones EPA used in the development of their numbers in this table. The numbers and methods are pretty significantly different from the 5 µg/L over 4 days that has been the standard since 1999. But it is also based on a more rigorous methodology.

Contaminants

Selenium Contamination

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So many reports assessing environmental conditions erroneously list selenium under the category of heavy metals or toxic metals. Selenium is not a metal at all. On the periodic chart, it is actually located between sulfur and tellurium and is part of what is called the oxygen family. Chemically, selenium acts somewhat similar to sulfur in that it combines with a lot of metals. It is often found in metal sulfide ore deposits (for example at copper and zinc mines), which may be why a lot of environmental scientists and engineers group it in with heavy metals when they are assessing water or soil for environmental contaminants. Selenium has long been known to have environmental impacts on egg laying animals such as fish and birds, but in humans selenium toxicity is rarely seen.

 

I checked with the bible of references for toxicity: The Agency for Toxic Substance and Disease Registry’s (ATSDR) Toxicological Profile for Selenium. The reference was updated in 2003. The reference gives only a few cases of selenium toxicity, mostly from industrial chemical exposure. But there are two interesting cases in China of selenium toxicity due to long term ingestion of high levels of selenium in food. Crops in these areas of China were planted in soils with very high natural selenium content and as a result selenium became incorporated into the plants biological structure during growth. Common health effects seen by doctors examining the people who lived in these areas were brittle hair and deformed nails. Tooth loss and the loss of feeling and control of arm and legs in some people were also noted. There’s actually a name for the health effects of too much selenium in your diet. It is called selenosis. It’s found not just in humans but in other mammals as well.

 

The Toxicological Profile also noted health effects due to low selenium in people’s diets. In fact, there is a Recommended Daily Allowance (RDA) for selenium. If you take a one a day vitamin like I do, you can see selenium listed right on the label.

IMG_1476

The RDA is 0.055 milligrams per day. Selenium is a vital trace element for humans and animals, but can be harmful at levels greater than recommended. The ATSDR noted that ingesting 10 to 20 times the normal amount of selenium can result in selenosis. So there’s actually a fair amount of difference between what’s needed and what’s toxic. The average American is getting somewhere between 0.071 and 0.152 milligrams per day depending on where they live and what they are eating. You’d have to be getting 0.55 milligrams a day of selenium over an extended period to have any toxic effects. Unfortunately for birds the difference between the level of selenium essential for daily nutrition and a toxic amount is very small. Bird toxicity is often the main concern when you see high levels of selenium in water and fish. The well known results of selenium poisoning in birds are eggs that don’t hatch and deformed chicks. Both fish and birds pass the selenium they ingest to their eggs. Humans excrete most of the selenium they eat in their food. Excrete is the polite way of saying we pass it out through urine or feces. The ATSDR noted no human reproductive issues from selenium. In fact the RDA for selenium for pregnant and nursing women is actually a tiny bit higher than for other adults.

 

Selenium is everywhere. It can be found in rocks and soils all over the world at very low levels. However there are certain areas of the earth where the rocks and soils are enriched in selenium. A lot of these rocks formed back during the last days of the dinosaurs in the time period geologists call the Cretaceous. I suppose I shouldn’t say the last days of the dinosaurs, because those last days lasted for eighty million years – but hey dinosaurs were around for quite awhile before then. The Cretaceous was also when plate tectonics sort of arranged the world’s landmass in the shape, if not the position, of the familiar continents we know today. In the Late Cretaceous there were a lot of very shallow inland seas. Much of the midwestern and western parts of the United States were covered with these shallow water bodies and over the millennia they filled with rich marine organic rock and evaporite deposits. Evaporite deposits are rocks like gypsum, salt and phosphate. Organic rich rocks include oil shale and coal. Rocks formed in these shallow marine basins contain higher levels of selenium compared to other rocks. In the Cretaceous these shallow marine basins existed not only in the United States but also around the world. There are younger rocks formed under the same conditions that also have the same high selenium content; notably the phosphate rocks in southeast Idaho.

 

These rocks are the source of a lot of trouble for the fish and bird populations of the world. The problem was first noticed way back in the 1970’s at a place called Belews Lake in North Carolina. Belews is not a natural lake. It is a man made reservoir that is essentially a cooling basin for a power plant – a coal fired power plant. One of the sources of water to the reservoir was a fly ash settling pond. When you burn coal you get fly ash. It’s what’s left over after the organic content is burned to create electric energy. It looks a lot like the ash you get in the bottom of your grill after barbequing with charcoal, except charcoal is made from wood. Coal is essentially a rock with a lot of organic matter. You have all sorts of elements in coal that are rock like – silica, aluminum, iron, and calcium. You also have arsenic, cadmium, chromium, molybdenum, mercury and the subject of this blog post – selenium. Some of these elements go up the stack of the power plant as air pollutants but the majority is left behind in the fly ash.

 

There are lots of accounts of what happened at Belews Lake, but in my opinion, William Frankenberger and Richard Engberg did the best review of the incident in the 1998 publication: Environmental Chemistry of Selenium published by Marcel Dekker, Incorporated. According to their report, the water entering the reservoir from the fly ash settling pond contained 150 to 200 micrograms per liter (parts per billion) of selenium. Doesn’t sound like much does it? In fact, in Belews Lake itself the selenium concentrations in the water were on average only 10 micrograms per liter. But when wildlife scientists started looking at why fish populations were disappearing in the lake, they found up to 70 percent of the fish in the lake had reproductive abnormalities and 16 fish species once found in the lake were totally gone. By 1978 only four species of fish were left in the lake and when their tissues were analyzed for selenium, they were found to exceed 100 milligrams per kilogram (parts per million).  Instead of excreting the selenium, the fish were storing the selenium in their bodies and passing it on to their eggs. Were the fish drinking the water? Of course not, the selenium in the water was being taken up by algae and other microorganisms and entering the food chain, which for fish include a lot of insects, worms, and the like who thrive on algae and microorganisms. In upstream reaches of Belews Lake unaffected by the water from the fly ash pond, normal fish communities were found. There the water contained less than 5 micrograms per liter of selenium. Noting the difference, scientists could pretty much conclude selenium is not good for fish. This was such a notable account of poisoning of fish from low selenium concentrations in water that in 1987 the Environmental Protection Agency changed their selenium freshwater criteria for the protection of aquatic from 35 micrograms per liter to 5 micrograms per liter.

 

The other landmark environmental account of selenium poisoning is that of the Kesterson Reservoir in the San Joaquin Valley of California. People often speak with reverence about the studies conducted there and scientists talk about the Kesterson Syndrome. Messieurs Frankenberger and Engberg also describe the Kesterson studies in the Environmental Chemistry of Selenium. Remember those Cretaceous marine rocks I described earlier? There are a lot of those exposed at the surface in the San Joaquin Valley in California. I think all Americans know the San Joaquin as a fertile agricultural valley in California, but like all agriculture in the dry western states, they water the heck out of it. There is a lot of agricultural drainage as a result and back in the 1970’s the state of California got the idea to build large shallow impoundments to serve as evaporation basins for the drainage, which could also be managed as a wetland in order to benefit wildlife. Sounds like a win/win right? In fact it looked like it was going to work. The ponds at first received all sorts of good quality agricultural water and a large size marsh with thriving wetland plant communities was established. Wildlife populations began to flourish. Then the impoundments started receiving the saline subsurface drainage from the agricultural irrigation. By 1981 all of the flow into the impoundments was this saline drainage and by 1982 scientists started seeing deterioration of the wildlife in the marsh.

 

When scientists measured the amount of selenium discharging into the marsh from the irrigation drainage, the water averaged 300 micrograms per liter. The many different fish species that once populated the marsh were gone. The only species left were the mosquito fish which is known to tolerate pollution pretty well, but even they were suffering from reproductive abnormalities and unhatched eggs. Mosquito fish had as much as 120 milligrams per kilogram selenium in their body tissue. Eggs of water birds in the marsh were analyzed by scientists and ranged from 4 to 70 milligrams per kilogram selenium, depending on what type of bird egg it was. I think Kesterson is where scientists first recognized that even among birds there were variations in tolerance for selenium. Scientists checked nests for eggs that failed to hatch. In one count of 578 nests, 39 percent of eggs in the nests had one or more eggs that did not hatch. Up to 15 percent of the egg embryos examined had deformities. Now I was going to include a photo from a U.S. Geological Survey report on bird deformities due to selenium, but I know some of my readers are a little sensitive. So I’m just going to provide a link. If you get queasy looking at road kill, do not click on this link:  http://www.nwhc.usgs.gov/publications/field_manual/chapter_44.pdf .

Fortunately drainage to the Kesterson Reservoir was stopped in 1986.

 

There are dozens more examples of where low levels of selenium have resulted in environmental damage. There has been a lot of research on selenium since the incidence at Belews Lake and in July of 2015, the Environmental Protection Agency issued a draft proposal for further updating the selenium water quality criterion for protection of aquatic life.

Contaminants

Environmental Protection Agency’s Supplemental Finding on the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards Regulations

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People ask me why I write so much about air, when my blog is about water. It certainly might be easier if our world was a more compartmentalized system, where no interactions occurred between air and water. Unfortunately our world is a complex place where air and water interact with each other and the terrestrial environment to bedevil such human endeavors as burning coal in power plants to produce energy. I’ve been writing about mercury in the environment for awhile now. One of the concerns with burning coal is the release of mercury into the atmosphere. Some of the mercury stays in the air and some of it falls into our water and soils when it rains. It’s a complex process and you can read about it in my blog post below.

The Mercury Cycle

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) wrote regulations to reduce mercury and other air toxins (such as selenium, nickel, cadmium, arsenic and chromium), from coal and oil fired electric utility generation. The rules are named the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards regulations and people refer to them as MATS for short. The EPA has been the recipient of numerous lawsuits because of MATS. A major concern in the lawsuits was the lack of cost benefit analysis in EPA’s determination to regulate mercury and other toxins released by power plants. EPA estimated the pollution controls in MATS would cost $9.5 billion to implement annually, while the regulation only identified $4 to 6 million a year in environmental and health benefits as a result of reducing mercury and other toxins. EPA also noted additional benefits would occur as a result of the pollution controls reducing sulfur dioxide and particulates. Sulfur dioxide and particulates are not considered toxins under MATS. They are regulated elsewhere in the Clean Air Act. Benefits of reducing additional sulfur dioxide and particulates through the implantation of MATS pollution controls were estimated to be $39 to 90 billion a year.

 

The lawsuits finally ended up in the Supreme Court and a decision was made by the Supreme Court justices last year. In their ruling, the Supreme Court noted the lack of a cost analysis for implementing the regulations and told the Agency it needed to consider cost, including the cost of compliance, before deciding whether regulating mercury and other air toxins is appropriate and necessary. But then the Court said, “it is up to EPA to decide how to account for cost.”

 

Well the plaintiffs in the lawsuit must have thought they had won big. As I noted in an earlier post a formal cost-benefit analysis would probably take years to conduct during which time industry could seek ways to delay implementation of costly air controls. But EPA was too smart. They looked at the Court’s phrase: “it is up to EPA to decide how to account for cost,” and decided those words did not mean a formal cost-benefit analysis was needed. Instead, EPA decided on a different method to determine if the costs for implementing the regulations  were reasonable. The method evaluated the cost of complying with MATS regulations to the historic annual revenues and expenditures by the power industry and its impact on retail electricity prices. EPA used 2000 to 2008 revenue data. The power industry in the U.S. basically had revenues of $277.2 to $356.6 billion annually during those years. When compared with EPA’s $9.6 billion estimate of annual industry cost to comply with the regulations, it works out the costs are only a small fraction of the industry’s yearly revenue, just 2.7 to 3.5 %. The impact on retail prices of electricity are also small, just 0.3 cents per Kilowatt hour. (And frankly we know it is the electric rate payer who will eventually pay the bill for the regulatory controls.)

 

EPA published the cost analysis on December 1, 2015 in the 40 Code of Federal Register 63 as the “Supplemental Finding that it is Appropriate and Necessary to Regulate Hazardous Air Pollutants from Coal and Oil-fired Electric Utility Generating Units.” This supplement was commented on by the public. Can you guess what a lot of comments were? Commenters said, “EPA’s preferred approach to considering cost didn’t rationally balance the costs of the rule against the public health and environmental harm identified.”  In other words, those commenters thought EPA’s method was a bunch of hooey and a formal cost-benefit analysis should be conducted. EPA looked at those comments and replied truthfully to them in the Final Supplement released in April 2016. EPA said the Supreme Court had not required the Agency to perform a formal cost benefit analysis but had instead clearly left it up to the Agency to decide how to account for cost. So EPA has determined in its final supplemental Finding: “a consideration of cost does not cause the Agency to change their determination that regulation of mercury and air toxins is appropriate and necessary under the Clean Air Act.”

 

Well do you think it’s over? No the first lawsuit over the EPA determination was filed April 25, 2016. In the meantime, the regulations are in effect and power plants are already implementing the new pollution controls or switching fuels from coal to natural gas. Is it worth it? In EPA’s supplement they cite the following statistics from 2005. During that year, electric generating utilities released to the atmosphere  50 % of the U.S.’s total man-made mercury emissions, 62 % of the total arsenic, 39 % of the total cadmium, 22 % of the chrome, 28 % of the nickel and 83 % of the selenium.

Contaminants

MethylMercury in Streams

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The U.S. Geological Survey issued a stream assessment report in November 2014. It is the first comprehensive look at methylmercury in streams within the United States. Although the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has conducted methylmercury assessments of water bodies in the past, their efforts have generally been concentrated on lakes. The Geological Survey report says one in four streams in the United States has fish with methylmercury concentrations exceeding EPA’s criteria for the protection of human health. EPA’s criteria for protecting human health are 0.3 parts per million methylmercury in fish tissue. The Geological Survey also said in their report that methylmercury in fish is the primary cause of fish consumption advisories for waterways.

 

During their study, the Geological Survey sampled 300 streams in the United States for methylmercury in water and methylmercury in fish. Large mouth bass were one of the fish they collected most for testing. Large mouth bass are what biologist call predator fish. Predator fish eat smaller fish as well as insects, frogs, snakes and other things that live in and on top of the water. From all the fishing shows you see on television, I guess it must be a very popular fish for sports fishermen. I don’t know how tasty it is to eat. But sports fisherman might want to note that in half the sites where the Geological Survey tested large mouth bass, these fish exceeded EPA’s methylmercury criteria for human health protection.

 

Now you might think: “Well, yeah that is probably in a bunch of streams near major urban centers.” Right? Well actually no. The Geological Survey found that in major contrast to other contaminants like lead, cadmium, arsenic and so on, methylmercury is highest in fish in undeveloped areas. The reason why methylmercury is highest in fish in rural areas is because of how methylmercury is formed. Mercury is converted into methylmercury via biotic degradation. In other words biota, like microbes and bacteria are taking up the mercury and converting it into methylmercury as they process organic material in the water. This conversion of mercury to methylmercury goes on wherever you have degrading organic material, but wetlands are kind of the hot bed of action for this process. Think about it, you have vast stretches of marsh grasses that die and then are replenished with new grass. These decaying grass mats can be really thick. You’d know this if, like me, you’ve ever waded into a wetland with some of those nutty guys who study coastal processes. Wetlands I can attest have deep organic muck. Wetlands also have something else these microorganisms like. They have very limited dissolved oxygen. These tiny little microbes reduce sulfate and low oxygen zones are where they live. So if an environment has lots of sulfate, then expect lots of these microorganisms and lots of methylmercury. Other environments that host these microorganisms include areas where water levels fluctuate, like in areas that are dammed or areas that flood a lot.

 

So any water basin with lots of wetlands is most likely to have higher methylmercury in fish. That is why most urban streams don’t have a lot of methylmercury. The wetlands in the urban environment have mostly been destroyed over the years. Let’s not let out a collective hurray for the lack of wetlands. Wetlands produce all sorts of other good ecosystem function, like filtering water and providing habitat and food for animals. It would be better to just keep the mercury from getting into the wetland. The only way to do that is to reduce the source of mercury. Most of the mercury in wetlands is being deposited there from the air and mercury gets in the air due to all sorts of human activities, for example burning coal in power plants.

 

One of the most noteworthy observations in the Geological Survey stream assessment was that the amount of actual inorganic mercury in a stream was not the driver for how much methylmercury there would be in fish. The Geological Survey looked at a number of streams in historic mining areas where mercury in the sediment and water is thousands of times greater than unmined areas. Because many of these streams have little organic material or wetlands, there is very little methylmercury in the fish. That is how important organic material and the microorganisms that degrade it are to the production of methylmercury.

Contaminants

The Mercury Cycle

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I thought a long time about the title of this post. At first I wanted to name it “Up in the Air” then I thought maybe “What Goes Up Must Come Down and Then Go Up Again”. But I stuck with the dull title of “The Mercury Cycle” because it is a clear presentation of how mercury acts in the environment. Everybody has heard of cycles: the cycle of life, the lifecycle of a product, lifecycle management, the lunar cycle. Well mercury has a cycle too. The mercury cycle is like a merry go round that never stops.

Before I write about the mercury cycle, I need to discuss metal species. Everybody has heard of species: plants have them, animals have them. We talk about the human species. Well metals have species too, but it is different. When scientists talk about metal species they are often talking about their oxidation state. We have to look back at our basic knowledge gained over the years, whether from a classroom or a Discovery channel special. You know everything is made up of atoms and those atoms are made up of electrons, protons and neutrons. You’ll maybe not remember but the electrons are the ones that are kind of special and exchange themselves to other atoms. Oxidation means that an atom is losing electrons. There is a complimentary process called reduction used to describe the other atom that is gaining the electrons. These exchanges go on at the molecular level too (remember molecules are a bunch of atoms). Mercury has only a few of these types of species. They include elemental mercury that hasn’t undergone any electron exchange and then the mercurous and mercuric forms of mercury which have lost electrons. Mercuric is the mercury that is most common. You will see it described as Hg (II). Hg is the periodic symbol for mercury by the way. People also talk about metal species when a metal bonds with another element. Again it is those crazy electrons who also share themselves between two elements. Mercury bonds with a lot of different elements, especially other metals. But when it comes to the mercury cycle, the species in which scientists are most interested are the ones where mercury bonds with sulfur and carbon. These mercury species are things like mercury sulfide and when you throw in a little hydrogen with some carbon you get your methylated mercury, including methylmercury, ethylmercury, dimethylmercury and so on. People refer to mercurous and mercuric forms of mercury and mercury sulfide as inorganic mercury. People refer to the methylated mercury as organic mercury.

Okay enough for basic chemistry. That is as far as I am going on that subject. It is a lot more complex but I wanted to tell you about metal species because they will play a role in the mercury cycle story.

The story begins with the release of mercury into the atmosphere. This can come from natural sources since mercury is everywhere in the environment to some extent. It is part of the earth. It is in our rocks and therefore our soils and when soils are eroded mercury goes into our streams and out to the oceans. So there is a natural occurrence of mercury in the environment. As mentioned in a previous post, mercury vaporizes at pretty low temperatures. Heat it up to like 357 degrees Centigrade and it boils. It has, I believe, the lowest boiling point for a metal. So natural mercury is being released to the atmosphere all the time, but at really, really low levels. Now add in your average human being who is interested in being warm in the winter, cool in the summer; who is in need of medical care; wants to put the trash out instead of letting it fill the house; and wants to be able to have nice white clothes and a safe drinking water supply free of bacteria. In other words, a person interested in living a modern existence. Now you start getting man-made sources of mercury in the atmosphere through the burning of coal, medical and trash incinerators, and chlor-alkali plants that are producing chlorine and other chemicals associated with the modern existence.

Mercury in the atmosphere is mostly in three forms: gaseous elemental mercury, the mercuric form, and particulates. The elemental form of mercury can be oxidized in the atmosphere, which results in even more of the mercuric form. Here’s the “what goes up must come down” portion of this post. Mercury comes down in the rain and snow. This is what is known as wet deposition. Mercury also just falls out of the air. Sure there is gravity involved but as usual it’s a lot more complicated. I’m not going into it, because I would have to explain Brownian motion and whole lot of other things. Just know that it is occurring and that it is called dry deposition.

The mercury falls on the ground and in the water. Mercury has a variety of things it can do.  In the ground it can get tied up in the soil thanks to all that organic matter. Or it can run off into the water or percolate down into the groundwater. If the soil is eroded, mercury can enter surface water that way too. Or it can enter surface water directly through wet or dry deposition.

Now that mercury has entered the environment from man-made and natural sources it can immediately get back into the mercury cycle and return to the atmosphere, it can get frozen into a great big glacier, it can get all tied up with the organic material in soil, it can float around in the water (although mercury is not very soluble), or it can settle down in the sediment. When it settles down in the sediment, mercury can undergo methylation if the right conditions exist. The methylation process results in methylmercury. Remember methylmercury is the bad stuff. Methylmercury is taken up by algae and bacteria then ingested by invertebrates living down there in the gunk. Algae and invertebrates are eaten by fish. Methylmercury is accumulated in fish tissue. Birds, animals and people eat fish. Not all birds, animals and people, but osprey, eagles, minks, otters and people along the coasts and lakes are usually chowing down on them. Hey I found a fish in my back yard that an osprey must have dropped! The ants were eating it, so you could probably include insects too.

Fish

There has been a lot of research going on in the past few years on how methylmercury is formed in the environment, but one of the interesting things I have read about is that methylation and demethylation can be going on in the same water body. So mercury is not tied up for all time as methylmecury but can get right back into the mercury cycle.

Now you have the low down on the mercury cycle – not a like a uni-cycle or a motorcycle – but a cycle that needs balance none the less. If humans continue to add to the mercury cycle, there could be a terrible wreck.

Contaminants

Supreme Court Makes Decision on the Environmental Protection Agency’s Mercury Air Toxics Standards Regulations

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You don’t often find anything amusing about Supreme Court decisions. They are usually laced with stuffy legal language on prior court decisions and how it applies to a case, but every once in a while you can get a good laugh. And that is the case in the June 29, 2015 Supreme Court decision on Michigan et al. versus the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). You may recall that this case is a result of a bunch of state governments and industry groups suing the EPA over the Mercury Air Toxics Standards Regulations issued back in February of 2012.

The regulations basically imposed pollution controls on power plants to reduce mercury emissions. The lawsuit was over the fact that the EPA didn’t consider the costs of health and environmental benefits achieved by the regulation versus the cost to industry for complying with the regulation. The cost of the regulation to industry was estimated at $9.6 billion a year. The EPA only conducted a partial cost benefit for reduction of mercury that established a yearly benefit of $4 to 6 million a year. Additional benefits for reduction of sulfur dioxide and particulates would occur as a result of the pollution controls and those were estimated to be $39 to 90 billion a year. But the EPA didn’t use those figures or any others in determining under their Clean Air Act authority that they should regulate power plant mercury emissions.

In deciding the case, the Supreme Court looked at the Clean Air Act which says: the EPA must conclude “regulation is appropriate and necessary” after studying hazards to public health posed by power plant emissions. The Court found that the agency considered regulation “appropriate” because mercury poses a risk to health and the environment and because pollution controls exist to reduce mercury. The agency also found the regulations “necessary” because other Clean Air Act regulations did not eliminate the risk of mercury. The Court held that the EPA interpreted the Clean Air Act unreasonably when it deemed cost irrelevant to the decision to regulate, because the Clean Air Act specifically required power plants to be treated differently from other sources (other sources don’t require a cost benefit analysis to regulate). The Clean Air Act specifically required a cost study for the regulation of power plants.

The Supreme Court decided that the EPA must consider cost, including the cost of compliance, before deciding whether the Mercury Air Toxics Standards Regulation is appropriate and necessary. But the Court said it is up to EPA to decide how to account for cost.

Good grief! All this decision does is “kick the can down the road.” Now the EPA must go back and do the full calculations of the regulations benefits. EPA even stated in the regulations that their calculation of $4 to $6 million was only a partial cost analysis based on IQ loss of recreational fishermen who caught and ate mercury contaminated fish. EPA acknowledged that this was a small subset of the overall benefits of reducing mercury. Now the EPA will have to engage in a much longer and more expensive cost analysis. The analysis will have to show the economic benefits to not only human health but the environment as well. That includes impacts to wildlife like ospreys and eagle, minks and otters, and the many other animals that eat a lot of fish. They will have to look at reproductive and other impacts to the fish themselves. EPA will also have to look at subsistence populations who regularly eat fish and to the population at large who are eating fish from mercury impacted waters. And will the decision to regulate based on the cost benefit study change? I doubt it. If you start looking at impacts to wildlife and fisheries including reduction of recreational uses of streams with consequent losses to local economies and impacts to the fishing industry, well you are going to get an enormous figure. Add on top of that the cost of the side health benefit for the easier to calculate reductions in sulfur dioxide and particulates and I would expect the annual benefits to be in maybe the trillion dollar range.

I thought to myself, surely these state governments and industry groups thought about this in advance before they took this case all the way to the Supreme Court. Of course this is all handled by the lawyers and they may not know much about the cost calculation of damages to health and the environment, but they have scientists on staff who should be very well aware. That’s when I started laughing. Of course they must have known. Maybe all they were doing in taking this case to court was fishing for a delay in implementation of the regulations.