David Beckman's Blog: Curbing Pollution

Earth Day Water Solutions Can Create More Livable Communities

2010-04-23T01:33:41Z

Yesterday I blogged about the issue of how well-suited the Clean Water Act is today, forty or so years after it was enacted, to address modern water pollution problems—namely polluted runoff. Today I want to highlight the solutions that exist today to solve our most pressing water pollution problems. In 2010, “green infrastructure,” a collection of approaches which collectively make built urban environments function from a hydrological perspective more like the natural environment, come as close to “win-win” solutions as we are likely to find. Collecting runoff and infiltrating into the ground or collecting and reusing it onsite solves a range of problems and creates, literally, greener and more attractive communities.

In the West (and increasingly in other parts of the country suffering water shortages), these techniques create low-cost, low-energy water supplies, and hedge against drought and climate change. NRDC has completed a report with researchers at the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara that illustrates the broad range of social benefits that green infrastructure can create.

Our report, entitled “A Clear Blue Future: How Greening California Cities Can Address Water Resources and Climate Challenges in the 21st Century,” reveals that widespread implementation of low impact development (LID) in a few major regions in California can have a wide range of positive impacts. By infiltrating and retaining water onsite, it can “create” enough water for 2 to 3 million people. By reducing at the margin the massive energy input needed to move water within the state, LID can save enough electricity for a city of 96,000 people. By reducing energy consumption it can create corresponding reductions of CO2 by an amount equivalent to 90,000 cars.

NRDC is focusing its clean water work on green infrastructure solutions because we are convinced that these solutions offer a constructive pathway that all reasonable stakeholders—environmentalists, cities, developers, and others—should be able to agree is worth pursuing. For its part, EPA needs to seize the moment, help quantify the benefits of LID nationally, and identify and remove barriers to its mainstream use in the U.S. And the good news is that a plan for controlling water pollution in the Nation’s capitol, released by EPA today, suggests that in important ways the agency is moving in a positive direction.

The availability today of attractive solutions to the runoff problem can soften debates about Clean Water Act requirements, such as those I blogged about yesterday. Once you see a greener city—green streets, roofs, less hardscape and more soft, shaded by trees, and cooler—you don’t need to consult the law books to say, “I want that.”

LA Neighborhood Solves Many Problems with a Little Less Pavement

2010-01-08T21:28:25Z

This week, the LA Times reported on the welcome plan to create a new park by narrowing Grand Avenue in the South Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. The story does a good job of describing how the project will make the avenue more pedestrian friendly and create much needed green space for residents.

One thing the story does not mention is that the park, and ones like it, can also help reduce water pollution at LA beaches. How? By cutting down on dirty stormwater runoff.

Though the article doesn’t mention it, narrowing streets and creating green space with unneeded roadway follows classic green infrastructure principles.

Green infrastructure--things like urban forestry, street-edge gardens, and pervious pavement--is a proven and cost-effective way to prevent polluted runoff. It can also help with water supply challenges by providing a place to infiltrate rainwater that would otherwise runoff and deliver pollution to rivers and the ocean.

Here is an example of a small piece of LA green infrastructure that will helps capture stormwater (photo credit: Haan-Fawn Chau).

Basically, less hardscape means less water rushing over pavement, filling up city drains, and getting dumped into ocean beaches. The extra plants and porous surfaces in a park like the one proposed for Grand Avenue can catch the rainwater before it even hits the streets.

And if the Grand Avenue park is designed with an eye toward the city’s water quality obligations, it could even route runoff from nearby streets toward the park, which would act like a giant filter.

Green infrastructure generates a broad spectrum of rewards. It increases property values, it is often cheaper than conventional development, and it has been linked to lower crime rates. More recently, as my colleague Nancy Stoner blogged about, studies have shown that green spaces actually make people happier and more community-minded.

To that long list, add the fact that green infrastructure is a potent solution to stormwater--our most problematic water pollution challenge--and is an increasingly important water supply source.

A little less pavement can go a long way these days.

Lake Tahoe, Clean Water BMPs, and My Summer Vacation

2009-08-26T17:22:31Z

I work in a world of impenetrable acronyms, most of which rarely get uttered outside of court rooms or policy negotiations. But a few weeks ago, I left the office behind and traveled to Lake Tahoe for a family vacation.

One morning I was flipping through the local phonebook when I stumbled upon an entry I never expected to see in the yellow pages: listing after listing for "BMP" contractors.

Most Americans don't know what a BMP is yet. It stands for Best Management Practices, and in water circles, it refers to techniques that prevent dirty stormwater runoff from ending up in lakes, rivers, and beaches.

Clearly Lake Tahoe cares enough about preserving its water resources that it has turned this wonky phrase into a part of everyday life.

Indeed, every Lake Tahoe builder and homeowner has to follow stringent regulations about how to manage water on their property. The BMPs help them achieve that.

The Tahoe Regional Planning Agency defines BMPs as "methods to help developed properties function more like natural, undisturbed forest and meadowland." In the natural world, these ecosystems act like giant filters, soaking up and cleansing stormwater before it flows into Lake Tahoe. The agency wants property owners to mimic these systems in their landscaping.

For instance, BMPs for private homes include planting or mulching bare soil, because this cuts down on the dirt that erodes into Lake Tahoe, and it helps the soil capture and retain more rain and snow melt. A major focus in on infiltration of water into the ground, as nature would have it-which of course reduces polluted runoff dramatically.

While some communities fight requirements to implement BMPs in new construction, in Lake Tahoe they are being retrofitted into tens of thousands existing properties, including private homes. When you sell a home in Lake Tahoe, you even have to disclose whether the BMPs have been installed yet.

Seeing the listings in the phonebook for BMP contractors made me realize two things.

First, that the majority of people who live in Lake Tahoe love the area and its crown jewel--the lake--enough to take real steps to keep it clean. They accept that the BMP regulations are a critical way of preserving what they cherish about their community. Indeed, the community is proud of its efforts--including installing BMPs throughout the region-to keep the Lake blue.

And second, that making a commitment to BMPs creates jobs.

I sometimes hear naysayers claim that regulating things like rain barrels or green roofs will be a burden for developers. But the Lake Tahoe phonebook illustrates that these regulations actually generate business. They put local people to work preserving the local community.

When, you look at the phone book (you can try this online by googling "Lake Tahoe" and "BMP") what you see is local builders, contractors, engineers, construction workers, material suppliers, and environmental agency employees-and even web designers-earning a living protecting the environment. Here are just a few listings (I should hasten to add these are just examples not endorsements).

Taken together, the Lake Tahoe BMPs add up to yet another acronym: LID, or low impact development. NRDC just released a report about low impact development. We found that not only can these techniques keep pollutants out of our waterways, but they can also help buffer dry Western regions from climate change and make communities greener, more appealing places to live.

Lake Tahoe is showing us how we can reap these benefits across an entire community. While people who live in the Tahoe Basin may have an easier time feeling a connection with their environment--living with a view of a Lake Mark Twain remarked was " the fairest picture the whole earth affords"--all of us live upstream from a river, lake, or a coast that needs protecting. The folks in Lake Tahoe are setting a good example for us all.

Low Impact Development Will Help California and the Arid West Retain Rainfall

2009-08-11T20:50:14Z

The good news is that in June, water use in Los Angeles fell to a 32 year low for the time of year, a remarkable savings considering the steady population growth the region has seen over that period. The bad news is that the reductions were spurred on by drought conditions that are gripping California for the third year in a row, and that drought, and the effects of global warming we are only just beginning to feel, severely threaten our remaining water supplies. Thankfully, an emerging land use planning and stormwater management design approach called Low Impact Development, or "LID," may hold the key to increasing the local, stable, supply of water in California, while at the same time reducing global warming pollution and the effects of climate change in the state. Even better, LID can provide these benefits at bargain prices.

Californians have a curious relationship with water. When it rains, which despite the semi-arid climate present throughout much of California it does in great rushes, we take the water and channel it into concrete and metal pipes and dispose of it as fast as we can - directing it from the unending hardscape we've paved over the ground with into gutters and storm drains to wash it, and a flood of pollutants it picks up along the way, down to the ocean or nearest water body, never to be seen again. Then, to make sure we can enjoy a cold drink or water our lawns, we take water from hundreds of miles away, pump it through deserts and over mountain ranges, and direct it to our taps and sprinklers without a second thought as to where it came from.

This paradigm of water management causes a host of problems, from polluting the waterways where our rainfall runoff, or stormwater, ends up being dumped, to contributing to global warming pollution, because pumping water over long distances uses tremendous amounts of electricity (which then further threatens our water supplies by reducing snowfall and surface flows of freshwater we rely on for our drinking water supplies). Which is where LID comes in: LID involves cost-effective land use practices that effectively mimic nature's own hydrologic features - instead of channeling rainfall away from where it lands, LID seeks to collect the water onsite to be used later, either by letting it soak into the ground to recharge local groundwater supplies, or by capturing it in rain barrels or cisterns so it can be used to water lawns, flush toilets, or for other non-drinking water applications.

Because the rainwater, and the pollutants it would otherwise pick up as it flows over paved surfaces never leave the site, the benefit of LID is that it prevents pollution from flowing to our beaches and other waters. But a second benefit is that LID gives us a stable, local supply of water, especially important as we face a continuing drought, and a source of water that is a lot more energy efficient and climate friendly than pumping water from across the state. It takes a lot less energy to supply water from a tank 10 feet from your house or office, or to pump it from 100 feet down in the ground, than it does to supply it from hundreds of miles away.

Building on this principle, NRDC recently completed a report, titled "A Clear, Blue Future, How Greening Cities in California Can Address Water Resources and Climate Challenges in the 21st Century." The report concluded that if every new development or redevelopment project at a commercial or residential site in urbanized Southern California and portions of the San Francisco Bay area were built using LID practices over the next 20 years, channeling water into rain barrels, cisterns, or the ground instead of into pipes and gutters, by 2030 we could supply enough water for some 800,000 families in California every year, or roughly two-thirds of the water used by the entire City of Los Angeles. In fact, every time it rains, up to 10 billion gallons of water pass through Los Angeles' storm drain system alone, enough water in one day to supply more than 60,000 families for a whole year. By supplying water locally, through nearby groundwater pumping or onsite capture and use, LID practices could also save more than 1.2 million Megawatt-hours of electricity, enough to power more than 100,000 homes each year. That's the equivalent of preventing more than 535,000 metric tons of CO2 from entering the atmosphere, the same amount emitted by nearly 100,000 cars on the road.

So the bad news is that drought and climate change will continue to pose a significant challenge to our ability to ensure the safe, reliable supply of water in California. But the good news is there's a clear, sustainable source of water right outside our doors and windows, falling on our roofs and driveways. All we have to do is reach out and catch it.

Water in California: A Picture is Worth a Thousand Drops

2009-02-13T00:19:36Z

"Seems it never rains in southern California
Seems I've often heard that kind of talk before
It never rains in California
But girl don't they warn ya
It pours, man it pours"

A singer named Mike Hammond had a Billboard No. 5 hit in 1972 with the song, "It Never Rains in Southern California." If you grew up in the 1970s (or channel surf on the radio even today) you may have heard of this song. I thought about it this week because it has been raining hard in Los Angeles just as local authorities announced that water rationing may be coming to LA. The downpours created torrents of runoff in the streets near my house, rising up the wheel wells of parked cars, and mildly flooding many intersections, as all this fresh water swept into storm drains and out to the sea. Billions of gallons literally turned into a pernicious waste (since the water picks up urban pollution on the way to the ocean) when-at the very same moment-fresh water is desperately needed in LA and many other places in the West.

NRDC has a vision for twenty-first century water management that would resolve the cognitive dissonance confronting anyone thinking about how we waste a scarce resource like fresh rain water in a desert, in a drought. My colleagues Barry Nelson and Doug Obegi have blogged about this vision, which Barry coined the "Virtual River." The Virtual River concept refers to our ability by implementing progressive water policy to "create" more new water than we can get from any real river in California, as much as seven million acre-feet, but without draining any of them or building a lot of new dams. We get the water in the "Virtual River" from water recycling, capturing storm water, increasing water use efficiency, and from related measures. One of the virtues of the Virtual River is that the actions that augment our water supplies, like storm water capture, also have the significant benefit of being potent antidotes to urban water pollution.

The concept is powerful, but sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words in illustrating what we are talking about. I took this video driving home last week when I saw a key aspect of the problem we are trying to solve neatly summarized: fresh rain water sheeting across an intersection and into storm drains as the rain fell, while sprinklers watered an adjacent lawn already thoroughly soaked by the rain. When we talk about a twenty-first century approach to water -- a "Virtual River" -- we are trying to change this sort of scene. Simple stuff. Capture the rain water. Stop wasting the water from the tap. Fix the state's water resources problems. Is it that simple? In fact, it pretty much is or could be, if we change the way we think about water policy.

Water Quality Regulation in California: A Day Late and a Dollar Short?

2009-01-29T22:11:34Z

Imagine your boss gave you a deadline, a really important one. The kind of deadline that affects the bottom line of whatever it is you do profoundly. And let's even imagine your boss tells you the deadline is imposed by federal law, and so your organization or company therefore must take it very seriously and comply.

And now let's imagine you miss the deadline. Not by a day or two. Or by a month. And not even by a year. But by many years: two, three, four, or even five years. What would happen to you?

You probably would be doing something different, right?

Well, not if you regulate water quality in California. There are, in fact, these sorts of really important deadlines that have a critical effect on the quality of the state's waters. But they are routinely violated by the state regulators, the State Water Resources Control Board and some of the Regional Water Quality Control Boards, entrusted with the duty to protect California's waterways.

The deadlines at issue require that new plans to control one of the largest sources of water pollution in California-polluted urban runoff-be revised and updated no less than every five years. Here's the law, from the Code of Federal Regulations:

§ 122.46 Duration of permits (applicable to State programs, see § 123.25).(a) NPDES permits shall be effective for a fixed term not to exceed 5 years.

The requirement for the plans, called discharge permits, originates in the federal Clean Water Act, the nation's basic law intended to keep waterways clean. The core component of the Clean Water Act is the issuance of permits -- basically, limitations on the discharge of pollution -- to dischargers of water pollution. Since one of the most important sources of water pollution is polluted urban runoff, when control plans are not updated, the consequences are serious. This is particularly true because the technical approaches to controlling runoff are improving rapidly, and so requirements in pollution control plans issued, say, five years ago do not reflect the best and most effective approaches available today. The equation is simple: missed deadlines equal more pollution.

My colleague Bart Lounsbury and I have been working on improving these permits and we have tried to ferret out how overdue for re-issuance many of them are in California. It's sometimes a little tricky to nail down the precise date when permits take effect, or expire, but here are just some examples of important permits overdue for re-issuance. The first group of permits below covers pollution discharges in the entire state from industry, construction sites and from thousands of miles of freeways. The second category of permits are regional-specific.

State Water Resources Control Board (statewide permits):

Construction General Permit: expired on August 18, 2004.
Industrial General Permit: expired on April 17, 2002.
Caltrans General Permit: expired on July 15, 2005.

Regional Water Quality Control Boards (regional permits):

Contra Costa County Permit: expired on July 21, 2004.
Santa Clara Valley Permit: expired on February 21, 2006.
Ventura County Permit: expired on July 27, 2005.
Los Angeles County Permit: expired on December 12, 2006.

An important thing to keep in mind is that permits remain in effect even when expired until a new one is issued. So no area of the state listed above is without any permit protection.

But the result of these missed deadlines is real and significant: more pollution. Exactly why California cannot meet its basic Clean Water Act obligations, and what can be done about it, is a topic for another post. A new report from a state commission takes a look at the poor performance by state regulators, and offers a range of possible solutions, some of which bear serious consideration. For now, however, it is apparent that fundamental components of the Clean Water Act are not being implemented faithfully in California. The system is simply not working.

"License to Kill" Southern California's Waterways

2009-01-08T22:31:24Z

My colleagues at Heal the Bay in Los Angeles have just released a terrific report on a key water quality issue: toxic discharges of pollution from industry and public wastewater treatment plants in the LA area. In "License to Kill: The Ineffectiveness of Toxicity Testing as a Regulatory Tool in the Los Angeles Region, 2000-2008," Heal the Bay found hundreds of instances where wastewater discharges contained toxic pollutants in toxic amounts: "there were 819 chronic and 68 acute toxicity exceedances in the [] effluent, and there were 408 chronic and 64 acute toxicity exceedances among all receiving water testing stations." Heal the Bay also found that virtually nothing was done about this: "[d]espite this frequency of instances of toxicity, the Regional Board [the local regulatory agency tasked with implementing clean water law] recorded only 80 violations in the Los Angeles region from 2000 to 2008."

What does this mean? It means that often times just existing in certain waterways in Southern California can injure or kill fish and other aquatic life. These are stunning findings, and they strongly suggest that the ability of local regulators to meet the Clean Water Act's goals and requirements has been compromised. Indeed, the very first section of the national clean water law says, "[i]t is the national policy that the discharge of toxic pollutants in toxic amounts be prohibited." (For those who want to read the text, see 33 United States Code Section 1251(a)(3).)

I will be blogging in the coming days about another major failure in water quality regulation in California, so stay tuned. Good work, Heal the Bay.

Fix The Sewer, Grow The Economy

2008-12-10T02:03:44Z

As Congress and state legislatures across the nation debate economic stimulus, investments in green infrastructure -- wind and solar power and expansion of mass transit, for example -- are getting well-deserved attention. The environment is, after all, the foundation of our nation's infrastructure. Investments in green infrastructure that provide jobs, power the economy, and protect the planet reflect that reality and offer taxpayers a multifaceted return on investment. As green infrastructure gains prominence as a component of job creation, however, it is vital that green investment include "blue" infrastructure: our water supply and wastewater treatment systems.

My colleague Michelle Mehta and I have been looking at how investments in water resources infrastructure can stimulate the economy and address increasingly serious environmental problems associated with water supply and treatment systems that sometimes literally are falling apart.

The environmental issues are hard to overstate. For example, the American Society of Civil Engineers gives the nation's drinking water and wastewater infrastructures a "D-" and estimates that six billion gallons of clean drinking water are squandered each day due to old, leaky pipes and mains.

So it's not surprising that the EPA estimates that the total national need for drinking water and wastewater infrastructure investment over the next 20 years approaches $500 billion. But replacing pipes is only part of the answer.

To reduce a growing water pollution source, urban runoff, we need to invest in greening urban environments to prevent rain from sweeping torrents of urban pollution into the water. Yet federal assistance is not even coming close to meeting this demand. In 2006, federal spending on water supply and wastewater treatment was $4 billion -- only about five percent of all infrastructure spending. Adjusted for inflation, federal contributions to the Clean Water State Revolving Funds, which provide low interest loans to state and local governments to fund water quality protection projects, declined by 70 percent since 1991.

According to the EPA, our aging wastewater treatment systems cause the discharge of 860 billion gallons of untreated or partially treated sewage into waterways each year. For example, recently Orange County, Calif., experienced its worst sewage spill in nearly a decade, when an aging sewer system spilled more than 500,000 gallons of sewage onto streets and into the ocean. In San Diego and Honolulu (cities nearly synonymous with beaches and surfing) and in dozens of other communities wastewater treatment plants still discharge minimally-treated sewage into the ocean. EPA estimates that without significant investment in sewage treatment systems, by 2025 key indicators of water pollution could reach levels not seen since before passage of the Clean Water Act -- undoing decades of progress.

Funding "blue" infrastructure projects, though, is a win-win situation for the environment and the economy. It is estimated that for each billion that the federal government invests in infrastructure, between 35,000 and 47,000 jobs are supported. Communities throughout the nation have more than $4 billion of wastewater treatment projects ready to go to construction within 90 days, if funding is made available. Just one such project in the 1990s, the upgrade of Los Angeles' Hyperion Sewage Treatment Plant, created more than a thousand jobs and is credited with major improvements in coastal water quality. Funding is often cited as a major obstacle to upgrading similar treatment plants, such as in San Diego and Honolulu.

These infrastructure upgrades are vital for the environment, now more than ever. With water shortages across the country, high energy demand to treat and move water, and population growth, we cannot afford aging drinking water systems that leak as much as 20 percent of their volume annually. Likewise, we cannot rationally throw away billions of gallons of urban runoff when it can be cleaned up and put back in groundwater aquifers. And we cannot ignore the potential of wastewater treatment plants to use advanced technology to purify wastewater so that it can be used again.

A federal infusion of money for clean water infrastructure projects of all stripes would provide jobs and a cleaner environment, all for the same buck. Lawmakers at the state and federal level should fund "blue" building projects to ensure that the water we drink and swim in is safe for years to come-and that there is enough of it to go around.