Washington State Department Of Ecology Wants To Have A Serious Discussion On How Everett, Washington Handles Wastewater

This in today from the folks at the Washington State Department of Ecology who are now accepting public comments through December 18th on the draft permit for Everett, Washington’s wastewater treatment plant.

What’s new from Department of Ecology

We’re updating the permit to match our current water quality requirements for all wastewater treatment plants. We are also proposing changes based on this facility’s unique location and circumstances.

One important change to the permit is a new requirement to identify and control the amount of PBDEs coming into the city’s system from industrial sources. PBDE stands for polybrominated diphenyl ether, a family of flame-retardant chemicals used in a range of consumer and industrial products, including foam, plastics, textiles, and electronics.

PBDEs escape from products and accumulate in the environment. Because of their widespread use, PBDEs have been found in atmospheric deposition, stormwater runoff, and industrial and domestic wastewater. (Read more about Ecology’s work to phase out PBDEs and develop alternative products.)

Recent studies have found elevated levels of PBDEs in juvenile Chinook salmon in certain areas of the Snohomish River, particularly in the lower estuary. PBDEs can affect the endocrine, reproductive, immune, and nervous systems in fish. Because it accumulates in fish tissue, it has effects throughout the food web and has also been found in Southern Resident Killer Whales (orca), which prey on Chinook salmon.

PBDEs enter the Everett wastewater treatment plant from multiple pathways and sources. One type of source is industrial facilities that discharge PDBEs into their wastewater, which then goes to the Everett facility. The draft permit outlines how the city must require relevant industrial wastewater dischargers to identify and control PBDEs in their wastewater before they release it into the municipal system. The permit also proposes that the city must monitor PBDE concentrations in the wastewater coming into the treatment plant in order to provide feedback on pretreatment program effectiveness.

We’re also proposing to require a similar pretreatment approach for PFAS, another family of persistent chemicals.

Combined sewer overflows

In portions of older cities, the same system of pipes carries both wastewater (containing sewage) and stormwater (runoff from streets and other paved surfaces) to a wastewater treatment plant. When there are large storm events that add more water to the system than it was designed to handle, the excess water discharges at certain points called outfalls to keep sewage from backing up into homes and businesses. These events are called combined sewer overflows.

Everett has 13 permitted outfalls for these overflows. We require Everett to control combined sewer overflows so that there is no more than one overflow at each outfall per year, on average. The city’s CSO outfalls must be controlled by the end of 2027.

The city recently acquired the old Kimberly-Clark industrial wastewater treatment plant and is planning to convert it into a new facility called the Port Gardner Storage Facility. The facility will temporarily store combined sewer flows until the collection system has capacity to convey the flows to the wastewater treatment plant. Project completion is anticipated by December 31, 2027, in time to meet the CSO control deadline.

Public comment period

We’re taking comments on the draft permit through December 18, 2023. To read the draft permit and the associated fact sheet, please visit the permit’s event listing page. To submit comments, please visit our eComments page.