Wednesday March 5, 2025
E & E News —
The Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down one of EPA’s long-standing tools for ensuring sewage treatment plants and industrial sites do not degrade water quality.
The 5-4 ruling in San Francisco v. EPA blocks the agency from holding the West Coast city liable for sewage discharged from a treatment plant into the Pacific Ocean based on language in its current wastewater permit.
Specifically, EPA cannot enforce provisions that “make a permittee responsible for the quality of the water in the body of water into which the permittee discharges pollutants,” according to the opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito. Instead, EPA must be specific about what permit holders can and cannot do, such as by imposing limits on each specific pollutant released by a facility, the court ruled.
At issue in the case are permits issued under EPA’s National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System, a key Clean Water Act tool for safeguarding rivers, lakes and streams nationwide. The ruling allows EPA to continue to use narrative permit language pertaining to water quality in some cases, instead of only numerical limits, but sets up a massive workload for the agency and other permit writers.