Florida Nutrient Standards Under Attack
Background: Nutrient pollution is becoming more widespread and severe throughout the nation, due in part to ineffective water quality standards that don't specify a numeric threshold for nutrients. This pollution is causing harmful algal blooms to increase in frequency and duration. Harmful algal blooms have been known to produce human health effects such as rashes, eye irritation, asthma attacks, or liver damage. These blooms also result in massive economic losses to coastal communities, affecting restaurants, lodges/hotels, fishing, and various other large contributors to coastal economies.
For more than a decade, even as the Florida Department of Environmental Protection increased it efforts to address pollution from these organic wastes, serious nutrient pollution persisted and grew worse. In 2008, testing by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection revealed that 1,000 miles of the state’s rivers and streams, 350,000 acres of Florida’s lakes and 900 square miles of its estuaries were contaminated by nutrient pollution from sewage discharges and fertilizer or manure runoff.
How we got here: In 1998, the Environmental Protection Agency sent a letter to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP) mandating that they develop numeric nutrient standards for Florida. When FDEP had failed to do so eleven years later, environmental organizations (Earthjustice, Conservancy of Southwest Florida and others) filed a petition to prompt EPA to require the standards to be completed and implemented in a timely manner. As a result, EPA proposed numeric standards for all Florida freshwaters this past January - with estuarine standards to follow in a couple years. Currently however, all the industries that generate nutrient pollution (dairy farmers, agriculture, fertilizer companies, wastewater utilities, developers, etc.) have banded together and launched a massive lobbying and advocacy campaign against these numeric standards being adopted. While the courts have upheld that the numeric nutrient standards are "reasonable" and "consistent with the Clean Water Act", the opposition is saying that these standards are unnecessary, based on bad science, unattainable, and unaffordable.
