New Alaska water quality rules are coming. Here’s what that could mean for wastewater systems.

New rules for wastewater are on the horizon for Alaska. The EPA has given the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation six to 12 months to update the state’s water quality standards, and the state’s largest wastewater system says new rules could present challenges.

The updated standards will provide a more accurate estimate of how much fish Alaskans eat, said Gene McCabe, the water division director at the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation.

“So the basic premise here is, is that you know, the fish live in the water, and if there are certain pollutants in that water, they will, over their lifetime, absorb those pollutants into their bodies,” McCabe said in a phone interview. “And then when humans eat them, of course, then we absorb those pollutants that are in the fish into our bodies.”

Some pollutants might sound familiar, like mercury and arsenic. Others are a bit more exotic, like tetrachloroethylene and dimethyl phthalate. Some come from industrial processes. Tetrachloroethylene, for instance, is used in dry cleaning and in some automotive brake cleaners. 

But some others — like dimethyl phthalate and other phthalate chemicals — show up all over the place, including many people’s homes, said Mark Corsentino, the general manager for the Anchorage Water and Wastewater Utility.

“It can be in cosmetics. It’s in laundry detergent. It’s in plastics,” Corsentino said in a phone interview.

Not to mention food and even some bottled water, plus some flexible PVC pipes.

Corsentino is in charge of the largest wastewater system in Alaska. He’s responsible for making sure the wastewater discharged from the city’s water system into Cook Inlet complies with the rules. And he’s concerned that the new rules could require screening wastewater for phthalates, which require expensive advanced treatment to remove from the water.

States all over the country are working on updating their water quality standards. Washington State recently went through a similar process also driven by an upward revision to the fish consumption rate. And certain pollutants are causing headaches as the state implements stricter standards laid out by the EPA in 2022.

“PCBs was probably the most vexing chemical for us,” said Melissa Gildersleeve, who oversees water quality standards for the Washington Department of Ecology.

PCBs are polychlorinated biphenyls. They’re now severely restricted in new products, but they show up in a ton of older products like pigments and coolant for electrical transformers. They’ve posed a particular problem in the Spokane area, Gildersleeve said, and while water treatment plants can remove a lot of PCBs, they’re not really designed to do so. 

“So, you know, a lot of our work has been about trying to find the ultimate source of the PCBs,” she said.

And once they find it, they go after the source. For example: earlier this year, Washington state officials petitioned the EPA to tighten limits on PCBs in consumer products.

Gildersleeve said it’s a similar story with phthalates, the chemicals that the folks in Anchorage are worried about. Even plastic cups and tubing used to take samples can contribute phthlates to the water, she said.

“That’s where a lot of our implementation is oriented, is it just really tracking down where those sources are,” she said.

And Corsentino, with Anchorage Water and Wastewater, said source control should be the focus in any effort to reduce how much the chemicals show up in wastewater.

For his part, McCabe, the water division director at the Alaska DEC, said he’s less concerned that stricter limits will pose a problem for wastewater operators. He said he’s been in touch with wastewater authorities around the state, and when they brought up chemicals that can leach from pipes, the department took a closer look at how they’re regulated across the country. Just a handful of wastewater facilities face specific limits for those pollutants as a condition of their wastewater permits, he said.

“And the only facilities we found were from very, very large cities, multimillion-population cities, so we weren’t really seeing them from the same type of population that we see here in Alaska,” McCabe said.

But for now, McCabe and fellow officials at the Alaska DEC are still working on what the state’s new water quality standards should look like. He says he’s hopeful the department will be able to release draft standards for public comment later this summer.