RD414 - 2010 Report on Toxics Reduction in State Waters


Executive Summary:
The Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) submits the annual Toxics Reduction in State Waters (TRISW) Report to the Governor and General Assembly of the Commonwealth on January 1st of each year, in accordance with Virginia Code § 62.1 - 44.17:3.

The primary objective of the TRISW Report is to document the Commonwealth's progress toward reducing toxics in state waters and improving water quality. This commitment includes three principal types of activities: (I) the prevention of contamination of the Commonwealth's waters by toxics, (2) the continued monitoring of those waters for the presence of toxics and (3) the implementation of remedial measures to reduce and/or eliminate toxics found in the Commonwealth's waters.

Prevention

Permitting: Compliance monitoring, the monitoring of in-pipe concentrations of permitted discharges, is one essential element of the prevention of contamination by toxics of the Commonwealth's waters. During State Fiscal Year 2010 (SFYI0), DEQ's Toxics Management Program (TMP) included 304 reporting facilities with 622 outfalls that had active permit-defined toxics limits in their effluents, as recorded in DEQ's Comprehensive Environmental Data System (CEDS) database. Approximately 4.3% of 2,473 individual parameter records exceeded the permitted average concentration and 4.1% of 3,097 exceeded their maximum permitted concentrations; almost all were incidental elevations of total or dissolved metals in discharges from municipal wastewater treatment plants.

Pollution Prevention: The 2010 Pollution Prevention Annual Report will be available on the DEQ WebPages at http://www.deq.virginia.gov/p2/homepage.html on January 1, 2011. Among the highlights of Pollution Prevention successes affecting reduction of toxics in state waters in the past year are the following:

• At the end of 2010, there were approximately 450 facilities in the Virginia Environmental Excellence Program (VEEP), 20 of which received special recognition. Virginia still provides performance-based permit fee discounts (from 2 to 20%) for "going beyond compliance." In 2010, over $127,300 in fee discounts were distributed among more than 100 VEEP facilities that implemented and carried out their Environmental Management System (EMS) plans. A review of VEEP annual performance for 2010 reported a reduction of 7.8 tons in the use of hazardous materials and a decrease of 325 tons in the generation of hazardous wastes.

• Total water use was reduced by 994.4 million gallons during the past year, and energy consumption was reduced by 144.9 billion BTUs.

• Releases to the atmosphere were also significantly reduced: emission of toxics, greenhouse gases (NOx, SOx), volatile organics and particulate matter were reduced by more than 3,900 tons.

• DEQ's Voluntary Mercury Reduction Initiatives also have been continued successfully. The "Virginia Switch Out" Project for the recycling of automotive mercury switches has removed 56,097 switches and recycled 123.4 pounds of mercury since 2006. Nearly 40 facilities have also pledged to annually recycle 53,000 energy efficient fluorescent light bulbs, which also contain small quantities of mercury. (Refer to DEQ's Mercury Reduction Webpage - http://www.deq.virginia.gov/p2/mercury/homepage.html.)

• Virginia's National Partnership for Environmental Priorities (NPEP) has joined EPA Region 3 and other Middle Atlantic States in the commitment to reduce priority chemical use. Four new facilities have pledged to reduce their releases by 6,500 pounds and others have eliminated their use of lead or have begun recapturing and recycling lead.

Environmental Education: Across the state, twelve regional teams continue to bring together local conservation organizations and education agencies to implement stewardship projects, provide field experiences for students and educate citizens about local issues. Virginia Naturally's monthly electronic newsletter provides over 2,000 educators and litter and recycling program managers across Virginia with information on special features (conferences, etc.), funding and awards deadlines, upcoming events, partner updates and resources. Non-competitive litter prevention and recycling grants ($1,524,694 in 2010) were provided to 306 local governments. The Environmental Educators Leadership Program and numerous Stewardship Training Workshops have provided training for hundreds of educators statewide.

Toxics Release Inventory (TRI): The Toxics Release Inventory documents the total quantities of EPA listed toxic compounds that are released annually to waters, air and the land by permitted facilities within the Commonwealth. Changes in the quantities of toxics released are indicative of the effectiveness of pollution prevention programs, but are not an adequate or representative measure of environmental impact or impairment.

The March 2010 TRI Report is available on the DEQ Website at: http://www.deq.virginia.gov/sara3. It summarizes data from calendar year 2008, during which 455 facilities filed 1672 individual reports. Statewide toxic releases to the water totaled approximately 20.3 million pounds or 39.3% of the total onsite releases to all media during 2008. This quantity represents a 9.4% increase from the 18.4 million pounds released to the water in 2007. Nitrate compounds (19.8 million pounds) represented 99.0% of the top ten TRI chemicals released to water. Nitrates, however, are of much more concern for their effects as nutrients rather than as toxics. Toxics criteria for dissolved nitrates in drinking water were not exceeded during SFY 2010.

Monitoring

Water Quality Monitoring Programs: Ambient water quality monitoring consists of the measurement of physical and chemical characteristics within the Commonwealth's streams, rivers, lakes, reservoirs and estuaries. Ambient monitoring and assessment characterizes ecological stressors and evaluates their potential impact on aquatic organisms and other wildlife, and on human health and recreational use of Virginia's waters.

Periodic updates and revisions of the agency's WQM Strategy are necessary as part of the continual planning process within DEQ's Water Quality Monitoring and Assessment (WQMA) Program. By 2008, the monitoring program had fully implemented two major changes in the 2007 WQMA Strategy that affected toxics monitoring and assessment; the adaptation of the monitoring program to the newly delineated sub-watersheds of the National Watershed Boundary Dataset (NWBD) and the realignment of the monitoring year to correspond with the calendar year rather than the state fiscal year. Between 2002 and 2010, more than 98 % of the Commonwealth's 1247 small watersheds were monitored.

Summer (Jul-Sep) of 2009 was the tenth year of DEQ's estuarine probabilistic monitoring (ProbMon) and the spring and fall of 2010 comprised the tenth year of its freshwater probabilistic monitoring. Because of resource limitations, the sampling and analysis for sediment organic contaminants was suspended at freshwater ProbMon sites in SFY07. Sediment chemistry (metals and organics) sampling and toxicity testing were continued at estuarine ProbMon sites during the 2009 field season (SFYIO) with resources provided by a probabilistic survey-targeted supplement to a federal grant, complimented with Chesapeake Bay Program support.

In the 2010 305(b)/303(d) Water Quality Integrated Assessment Reports, sediment chemistry, sediment toxicity and benthic taxonomic results from DEQ's Estuarine Probabilistic Monitoring Program were used for a toxics-related "Weight-of-Evidence" assessment of aquatic life use at 300 estuarine sites. These results, primarily from minor tidal tributaries, complement those from the Chesapeake Bay Program's benthic probabilistic monitoring program, which emphasizes the extensive mainstem areas of major tidal tributaries and the main Bay. More recent ProbMon results from 2010 (an additional 22 estuarine and 50 near-shore oceanic sites) will be incorporated into the 2012 Integrated Report. An additional line of chemical evidence, based on the solubility of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) present in the sediment, has now been added to the weight of evidence assessment procedure.

Analytical results from the downsized 2009 Fish Tissue Monitoring Program sampling are now available ( http://www.deq.virginia.gov/fishtissue/). Five sites in the James River basin were sampled in early 2009 as part of a Kepone special study; the results from that study are posted at the Fish Tissue WebPages link above. Agency plans to sample fish tissues and sediment during 2010 were suspended due to limited resources. However, fish samples for ecological risk assessments were collected at 22 estuarine sites from June - September 2010 as part of the National Aquatic Resources Survey (NARS), National Coastal Condition Assessment (NCCA) Program. The results of those samples are expected to be available for the 2011 TRIW Report.

Extensive monitoring of toxics for more than three decades has revealed that the distribution and concentration of contaminants vary greatly among sediment samples, whether they are nearby duplicates collected on the same day or sequential samples collected over various time spans. No definitive long-term trends have been detected to document consistent changes in toxics contamination. The probabilistic monitoring of toxics during the past eight years has demonstrated that statewide, concentrations of dissolved trace metals and organics in ambient waters are generally representative of global background levels, except near confirmed or suspected point sources. Periodic reports on the probabilistic results provide a baseline for future comparisons. Recent developments of more efficient sampling designs, sampling technologies and analytical methods otter promise of more effective documentation of short-term changes and mid-term trends in toxics in the near future.

Assessment and Remediation

Assessment: The most recent (2010) 305(b)/303(d) Water Quality Integrated Report identified 12,101 miles of impaired streams and rivers, 96,651 acres of impaired lakes, and 2,157 square miles of impaired estuaries. Of those impaired by toxics, over 99% were listed for fish consumption advisories, primarily for PCBs (31.0% of toxics-impaired rivers, 56.1% of lakes, 98.4% of estuaries) or mercury (61.4% of rivers, 42.3% of lakes, 1.0% of estuaries). Because the number of segments united into each Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) varies with the hydrography and the extent of the impairment, the exact number and schedule of toxics-related TMDLs to be developed and implemented is not certain. DEQ's PCB Strategy (2005) establishes priorities for TMDL development and discusses various options for remediation. Analyses for the 2012 Integrated Report will begin in 2011, and any new PCB-impaired segments will be integrated into the Strategy.

Remediation / Reduction: A number of toxics-related TMDLs have been completed and approved since 2002; two in 2002, three in 2004, and 16 in 2007, all for PCBs in the Shenandoah (5) or in other Virginia tributaries to the Potomac (16). Two benthic TMDLs were completed for toxics parameters, one (copper and zinc) in the New River basin (2004) and one (PAHs and lead) in the Shenandoah (2006). Two TMDLs for chlorides were also completed, in the Holston River basin in 2006 and in the Big Sandy basin in 2007. An ammonia TMDL in the Shenandoah basin was completed in 2009, and a PCB TMDL in the Roanoke (Staunton) River basin and a complex mercury TMDL in the Shenandoah River basin were completed in 2010.The Smith River has a benthic TMDL within which a stressor analysis is ongoing. PAHs have been implicated as a potential stressor. PCB TMDL development initiated for the upper tidal James River and the Elizabeth River in 2009 has continued and public meetings are being held in December (20 I0) and January (2011). The agency's TMDL history, current status and development plans are available at http://www.dequ.virginia.gov/tmdl/.

As these TMDLs are completed and scheduled for implementation, and others are added, follow-up monitoring will be initiated to evaluate their effectiveness in reducing toxics contamination. The effective implementation of these TMDLs should result in measurable reductions of contaminants in a number of the state's watersheds within a few years.

A number of water bodies and/or segments previously listed for toxics have recently been removed from the 303(d) list: several segments in the Shenandoah for nitrates (public water supply), several segments in the Elizabeth River system for tributyltin (aquatic life), two segments in the Dan River for DDT (fish consumption), two segments in the Holston River basin for lead (aquatic life), one segment in the Clinch and one in the Russell Fork for PCBs (fish consumption), and two segments of Lake Anna and an adjacent tributary for lead (aquatic life, wildlife).

Continued Commitment

DEQ continues its commitment to toxics reduction by the prevention of contamination, continued water quality monitoring, and the implementation of remedial measures. The Virginia Pollutant Discharge Elimination System, the Pollution Prevention Program, and the Environmental Education Program join with other agencies, programs and stakeholders to promote public awareness, as well as to control and reduce toxics releases. The Toxics Release Inventory and various water programs constantly monitor and document the release to, and the presence and movement of toxics in aquatic environments. Close coordination between monitoring and assessment activities will identify new sources of contamination as they occur and document the effectiveness of load allocations and other remedial measures developed and implemented by the TMDL Program. The agency anticipates significant reductions of toxics in the state's waters as a result of continued TMDL implementation.