Moving Beyond Pollution in the Great Lakes 

Accounting for 90 percent of the fresh surface waters of North America, the Great Lakes are truly a national treasure. They not only provide drinking water and recreation for millions of Americans; they are also the lifeblood of the region— the Grand Canyon and the Yellowstone of the Midwest, as Chicago Congressman Rahm Emanuel observed.

Yet, this summer the Great Lakes faced a new threat from one of the world’s largest corporations: BP. Despite BP’s marketing on its environmental reputation, the company sought—and was granted—permission to increase it’s dumping to 1500 pounds of ammonia and nearly 5000 pounds of sludge particles daily from its Whiting, Indiana refinery into Lake Michigan. These increases set a dangerous precedents by being the first in years to allow an industrial discharger to increase toxic pollution into Lake Michigan.

In response, Environment Illinois and its affiliates helped organize what the Associated Press called a “firestorm” of public and political outrage. And on August 23, BP publicly pledged to avoid increasing its pollution.

But BP isn’t the only company seeking to dump more pollution into the Great Lakes. Pollution increases are pending for U.S. Steel in Indiana, Murphy’s Oil on the Wisconsin shore of Lake Superior, for ConocoPhillips and Marathon Oil in Illinois, and elsewhere in the region.

The Clean Water Act gives us policy tools that should largely clean up industrial pollution. The Act’s stated goal, after all, was to make all waters of the United States “fishable and swimable” and, by 1985, to eliminate pollution discharge into America’s waters. The act and its implementing rules also include “antidegradation” provisions to ensure that clean waters stay that way.

But the Clean Water Act only works when states enforce it. Unfortunately in the case of U.S. Steel, like BP’s, Indiana is advancing a permit that, among it’s other flaws, grants the company five year “compliance schedules”—in other words: passes to continue polluting for the life of the permit—for toxic chemicals like mercury. The draft permit also allows increases of toxic industrial pollution into Lake Michigan and the Calumet River without even requiring scrutiny of existing pollution control technologies that could mitigated those increases.

The Great Lakes still face a litany of threats, from sewage overflows and invasive species to unrestricted water withdrawals. With years of progress cleaning up industrial pollution, and with so much left to do to restore the Great Lakes, poor state enforcement of the Clean Water Act is the LAST thing we need.

That’s why Environment Illinois continues working to ensure that the Clean Water Act is fully enforced. This fall, we joined other groups in calling for U.S. EPA hearings on the draft U.S. Steel permit, which were attended by hundreds, and submitted testimony urging EPA to block the permit until Indiana fixes it to comply with the Clean Water Act and prevent unnecessary and unlawful harm to the Calumet River and Lake Michigan.

Environment Illinois Advocate Max Muller at a rally opposing BP's dumping plan.