“This disastrous rule will allow coal power plants to continue dumping toxic wastewater–filled with dangerous pollutants like lead, mercury, and arsenic–into the same waterways that our families drink from and play in,” said League of Conservation Voters Deputy Legislative Director Madeleine Foote.
To what is the Director referring? The last steps to roll back regulations requiring clean-up of wastewater from coal-fired power plants. The regulations were put in place to severely limit the release of dangerous substances like arsenic and mercury into water used by these plants, reducing pollutants by 1.4 billion pounds. The Environmental Protection Agency under President Obama put such regulations in place in order to protect our waterways, used for drinking and recreation.
Betsy Southerland, the director of science and technology in the EPA’s Office of Water during President Obama’s tenure, stated that using membrane filtration would be enough to meet the regulation. This type of filtration involves running polluted water through a membrane, or membranes, with very small pores such that the pollutants are kept separate from the water that is allowed to flow through.
IXPower Clean Water has a technology that would not only remove the most dangerous pollutants, but could remove metals and virtually all pollutants contained in coal-fired power plant waste water, resulting in a cleaner product with less waste than other methods of cleaning polluted water.