Commercial ships must dump ballast water at sea or rinse their tanks if empty under a new federal policy designed to prevent invasive foreign species from entering the Great Lakes and other U.S. waters.
The Environmental Protection Agency included the requirement in a general permit issued Thursday under a court order requiring it to regulate water discharges from ships to protect native ecosystems.
The permit had been scheduled to take effect Friday. But a federal judge in California postponed the date until Feb. 6, giving states more time to impose additional requirements for vessels operating in their waters.
EPA previously exempted ballast and most other vessel discharges from regulation under the Clean Water Act. Environmental groups and a half-dozen states sued the agency over that policy because many invasive species are ferried to U.S. waters in ballast that oceangoing freighters release in domestic ports.
Global hitchhikers such as zebra mussels and freshwater ruffe fish out-compete native species for food, spread disease and cost the economy billions.
In addition to ballast, the new EPA permit sets rules for 25 types of discharges from ships, such as oily bilge water and "gray water" from showers and sinks. It covers an estimated 61,000 domestic ships and 8,000 foreign-flagged vessels.
"This is a significant event in the history of the Clean Water Act," said Benjamin Grumbles, EPA’s assistant administrator for water. The agency has "delivered a protective and practical permit to protect the nation’s waterways from shipborne pollution and to avoid an environmental and economic shipwreck," he said.
Environmentalists complained the agency had done little more than adopt a Coast Guard policy they consider insufficient. It requires transoceanic vessels to dump ballast water at least 200 miles from shore. Those carrying no ballast must rinse their tanks with salt water, a process known as "swish and spit," to kill organisms lurking in residual puddles or mud.
Those are good first steps but don’t prevent some invaders from slipping through, critics said.
"This permit doesn’t require ships to do anything more than they’re already doing," said Andy Buchsbaum, director of the National Wildlife Federation’s Great Lakes office. "So we’ll continue to have the same invasions of exotic species that we did before."
Nina Bell, executive director of Northwest Environmental Advocates in Portland, Ore., said the permit "looks like a Bush administration kind of response to a critical environmental problem, in that it is completely inadequate."
Grumbles said the permit imposes a number of new requirements that would reduce discharges of pollution and live organisms. Among them: mandatory ballast exchange and saltwater tank flushing for some vessels on nearshore Pacific voyages.
But EPA does not force ships to install onboard systems for sterilizing ballast tanks to kill aquatic creatures, agreeing with the maritime industry that effective technology remains unavailable.
Several cleansing methods have been devised and won approval from other nations, but the U.S. has yet to certify them and has no structure in place to do so, said Steve Fisher, executive director of the American Great Lakes Ports Association.
The permit also establishes no nationwide standard for ballast cleanliness, as environmentalists wanted. Legislation to set a federal policy stalled in Congress this fall. The Coast Guard has been drafting regulations for years.
However, many states are using their authority under the Clean Water Act to make requirements exceeding those in the EPA permit for waters under their jurisdiction.
In the Great Lakes region, five states _ Minnesota, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Illinois _ are adopting an International Maritime Organization standard limiting the number of live organisms in discharged water.
Michigan has its own regulation that requires ships to keep their ballast on board or treat it with approved methods. New York has ordered ships to reach a cleanliness level 100 times stricter than the IMO standard. California also goes well beyond the international standard.
Wisconsin dropped its effort to tack on further requirements this week after failing to meet the EPA’s Thursday deadline. But with the 48-day extension for EPA’s permit granted Friday by the U.S. District Court in San Francisco, Wisconsin will resume crafting its version, said Adam Collins, spokesman for the state Department of Natural Resources.
The differing state rules could pose challenges for shippers. For example, some are demanding compliance by 2016, while New York wants its standard met by 2012.
"We’re a little anxious as an industry that states are imposing these requirements while technology to meet them isn’t available right now," Fisher said.
The National Wildlife Federation filed lawsuits this week against Michigan and Minnesota, saying their policies weren’t strong enough. The group also filed an administrative challenge against Wisconsin’s plan before it was abandoned.
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