Representatives of several environmental organizations on Wednesday urged the agency to tighten regulations that govern precisely what these facilities can release into streams and rivers.
The activists were delivering their opinions at the first of two public hearings regarding the EPA's preferred version of the new Meat and Poultry Effluent Guidelines, which the agency published in mid-December.
The proposed rules would ban slaughterhouses from discharging many forms of waste directly into waterways — making the wastewater protocols more stringent than those of the Trump administration.
"The Biden-Harris Administration is committed to following law and the best available science to safeguard communities from pollution," Radhika Fox, the EPA's outgoing assistant administrator for water, said in a December statement.
By ending direct dumping of many pollutants into waterways, the EPA offers substantial improvements over the status quo, the green groups conceded.
EPA estimates found that the new rules would keep 9 million pounds of nitrogen — and 8 million pounds of phosphorous — from entering U.S. waters.
The sources of these contaminants would include waste products like blood, fat and the slurry of grease and suspended solids left on slaughterhouses floors after the meats and hides are gone.
But as currently proposed, the rules "would allow thousands of slaughterhouses to continue to dump nutrients into public sewage treatment plants that aren't prepared to handle them," Sarah Kula, of the Environmental Integrity Project, said in a statement.
Industry groups, in contrast, offered qualified praise of the rule. Meatpackers were generally "happy" with the proposal, Chris Young, executive director of the American Association of Meat Processors, said in a December statement.
Before the rule was announced in December, a coalition of Republican senators had warned the agency against adopting rules that might put undue strain on small meatpacking facilities.
"We need to ensure that these very small and small facilities do not face regulations that will force them to close," the legislators wrote in their letter to EPA Administrator Michael Regan.
"EPA responded to our concerns and minimized the impact of the rule on those businesses," Young said in his December statement, though he noted he was "still concerned about the overall impact of the rule on the industry as a whole."
But environmental nonprofits — which sued the EPA in 2019 and 2022 to get even the agency's newly proposed level of protection — argued that the suggested rules contained a gaping loophole.
While direct pollution would be more tightly controlled if the proposed rule is finalized, most slaughterhouse pollution doesn't go straight into waterways, groups like the Environmental Integrity Project and Food and Water point out.
Instead, more than half of the country's 3,879 slaughterhouses send their waste to municipal water treatment facilities, many of which aren't equipped to deal with the phosphates and nitrogen that come from slaughterhouse waste, the groups argued.
These contaminants — and the oxygen-sucking algal blooms they nourish — are primary causes of a perennial marine dead zone at the mouth of the Mississippi River.
But the EPA's preferred version of the new rules wouldn't require slaughterhouses to pull those contaminants out of their waste streams before sending them on — meaning that many such contaminants would still likely end up in rivers.
At the public hearing on Wednesday, environmental groups testified in support of a stricter option the agency has proposed — which would require the facilities to remove phosphates and nitrates from their waste before sending it to treatment facilities.
"If the price of a slightly cheaper chicken nugget is dead fish, toxic algae or people getting sick from pollution, I think most Americans would say no thank you," John Rumpler of Environment America said in a statement.
A second public hearing on the issue will occur on Jan. 31, and the final date for submitting public comments to the EPA is March 25.
When asked for comment by The Hill, an EPA spokesperson did not address the criticism of a continued loophole, but emphasized the agency was awaiting public input before finalizing the new regulations.
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