Industrial waste

[2][better source needed] Most countries have enacted legislation to deal with the problem of industrial waste, but strictness and compliance regimes vary.

Sewage treatment plants can treat some industrial wastes, i.e. those consisting of conventional pollutants such as biochemical oxygen demand (BOD).

[5] Many less-developed countries that are becoming industrialized do not yet have the resources or technology to dispose their wastes with minimal impacts on the environment.

Under US law, waste may be classified as hazardous based on certain characteristics: ignitability, reactivity, corrosivity and toxicity.

If the wastewater is discharged without treatment, groundwater and surface water bodies—lakes, streams, rivers and coastal waters—can become polluted, with serious impacts on human health and the environment.

[14] However, the local governments do not dispose of the waste by themselves but instead hire private companies that have been granted the right from the Pollution Control Department (PCD) in Thailand.

The 1976 Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) provides for federal regulation of industrial, household, and manufacturing solid and hazardous wastes in the United States.

[21] RCRA first began as an amendment to the Solid Waste Disposal Act of 1965, and in 1984, Congress passed the Hazardous and Solid Waste Amendments (HSWA) which strengthened RCRA by:[22] Furthermore, the EPA uses Superfund to find sites of contamination, identify the parties responsible, and in the occurrences where said parties are not known or able to, the program funds cleanups.

The Superfund process is to: 1) collect necessary information (known as the Remedial Investigation (RI) phase); 2) assess alternatives to deal with any potential risks to the environmental and human health (known as the Feasibility Study (FS) stage); 3) determine the most suitable remedies that could lower the risks to more adequate levels.

EPA has authorized individual state environmental agencies to implement and enforce the RCRA regulations through approved waste management programs.

The RCRA framework provides specified subsections defining nonhazardous and hazardous waste materials and how each should be properly managed and disposed of.

Since establishment, the RCRA program has undergone reforms as inefficiencies arise and as waste management processes evolve.

[30] A 1948 law had authorized research and development of voluntary water standards, and had provided limited financing for state and local government efforts.

The 1972 law prohibited, for the first time, uncontrolled discharges of industrial waste, as well as municipal sewage, into waters of the United States.