Uniform effluent standards for hazardous substances 2001 02 79

 Uniform effluent standards for hazardous substances

Sewage treatment methods in public sewage systems and watershed sewage systems" are mainly microorganism-based purification methods that mainly remove organic matter, and many other hazardous chemicals and other substances cannot be treated. For this reason, the Sewerage Law stipulates that industrial wastewater discharged from factories and business establishments that cannot be treated at a final treatment plant must be discharged into the sewage system after being made almost equivalent to the water quality standards of the effluent from the final treatment plant.

Since its enactment in 1970, the Water Pollution Control Law, which sets "uniform standards" for substances that have a significant adverse impact on the environment, has been strengthened year by year through the addition of new regulated substances and the accompanying expansion of the scope of specified facilities. Companies are also increasingly responding to the recent tightness of industrial water supplies, groundwater withdrawal restrictions to prevent land subsidence, and restrictions on the amount of water discharged in accordance with total volume control regulations. What used to be a matter of simply treating wastewater to standard effluent levels is now being replaced by the use of advanced treatment, such as desalinization, to recover and reuse wastewater. As a result, the reuse of wastewater and valuable resources in wastewater has led to cost reductions, and efforts are being made as part of an environmental management system based on ISO 14001.

Regulations on industrial wastewater will no doubt continue to be tightened in the future. Some substances that have not been subject to regulation so far are suspected of being environmental hormones, and as the cause-and-effect relationship of their effects on living organisms is clarified, we will be forced to deal with them in the future.

Uniform Effluent Standards

Small-scale businesses with an average daily wastewater discharge of less than one cubic meter have been exempted from the effluent regulations for non-designated hazardous substances under the Water Pollution Control Law. Such small-scale operations account for 90% of all business establishments in Japan, and untreated wastewater discharged into rivers and other bodies of water has become a major problem. In October 2000, the Special Committee on Wastewater Regulations of the Water Quality Subcommittee of the Central Council established effluent standards for fluorine, boron, nitric acid, nitrite nitrogen, and other toxic substances. The Ministry of the Environment intends to revise the related Cabinet Order and put it into effect in the spring of 2001.

The Fifth Total Emission Regulation

In order to improve the water quality of a wide-area closed water body, it is important to effectively reduce the total amount of pollution load flowing into the water body. For this reason, the 1978 revision of the Water Pollution Control Law established a system of total quantity control of water quality. Since 1979, the total volume control has been implemented four times with COD (chemical oxygen demand) as the designated item and target years of FY83, FY88, FY93, and FY98 as the total volume control. According to the Ministry of the Environment's FY99 public water quality measurement results, the achievement rate of environmental standards for health items targeting cadmium, cyanide, and other toxic substances was 99.5%, indicating that wastewater treatment in the industrial sector has made considerable progress.

In October 2000, the Water Quality Subcommittee of the Central Environment Council issued a report that established a range of effluent concentration standards for each of 232 industries, including the sewerage and fertilizer manufacturing industries, to serve as a guideline for the regulatory values to be determined independently by the prefectures concerned in these three ocean areas. The report was compiled for each of the 232 industries, including the sewage and fertilizer manufacturing industries.

The report calls for the addition of nitrogen and phosphorus to the total volume control by 2004, the target year for the fifth round of water quality total volume control, as well as the strengthening of control standards for COD in the pulp, petrochemical, and fermentation industries. In response to the report, the Ministry of the Environment plans to issue a public notice on the scope of the standards, and it is expected that prefectures will actually begin regulating in FY2001.