IMPACT OF PRIORITY POLLUTANTS
ON PUBLICLY OWNED TREATED WORKS PROCESSES:
A LITERATURE REVIEW
Larry L. Russell, Vice President
Christopher B. Cain, Supervising Engineer
James M. Montgomery Consulting Engineers
Walnut Creek, California 94598
David I. Jenkins, Professor
Department of Sanitary Engineering
University of California
Berkeley, California 94720
There has been a steady increase in interest in the impact of toxic industrial pollutants on
publicly owned treatment works (POTW), in part due to federal regulatory pressure in the
form of EPA-mandated pretreatment programs. The setting of numerical industrial discharge
limits for specific pollutants has often resulted in contention over the exact concentration
threshold at which a particular pollutant will cause unwanted effects on POTW processes.
This chapter assembles the information available in environmental engineering literature on
which such numerical limits can be based.
The city of Indianapolis is conducting a pretreatment program that includes revision of
the Industrial Waste Ordinance to prevent impacts on the city treatment plants caused by
discharge of industrial waste to city sewers, particularly priority pollutants as defined by the
EPA. Documentation is required to develop rational numerical limitations on specific
industrial priority pollutants in the ordinance. Consequently, a literature review was conducted to document the impact of priority pollutants on POTW processes. The results of the
review indicate that there is sufficient evidence to justify quantitative numerical limitations
on priority pollutant metals discharged to city sewers. However, limitations on priority
organic compounds should take the form of limitations on spills or slug discharges, because
POTW impacts from priority organics occur at concentrations several orders of magnitude
greater than those typically found in municipal sewers.
OBJECTIVES
The objective of this literature review was to search the available literature, including
EPA documents, engineering journals and other scientific sources, and assemble reports of
experiments in which priority pollutants have been observed interacting with typical POTW
treatment processes. The information from each reference was then summarized in terms of
the concentration of the pollutant tested, the process observed and observed impact. The
results of the impact review were then compared with the concentrations of priority pollutants that have been found by sampling POTW influent wastewater. Comparison of the
results of these two approaches provide a starting point to evaluate whether a compound
merits limitation in an industrial waste ordinance and at what concentration, if any, the
limitation should be set.
APPROACH
This literature review was conducted by a thorough search of the literature resources
available in the library of the University of California at Berkeley. The review made use of
the bibliographies attached to several publications that have proposed guidelines or "thresh-
871