The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has a long history of failing to adequately regulate factory farms under the Clean Water Act. That’s why Food & Water Watch and Snake River Waterkeeper filed suit against the EPA in the federal Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit for issuing a permit for Idaho factory farms that contained essentially no pollution monitoring, as required by the Clean Water Act. And we won, with the Court sending the permit back to EPA to add monitoring because there was no way to know whether a factory farm was violating the Clean Water Act without monitoring in place.

National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) General Permits are meant to ensure that factory farms comply with pollution restrictions that protect waterways for recreation, fishing, wildlife, and other uses. Throughout the country, there are thousands of factory farms that produce vast quantities of pollutants like E. coli, nitrogen, phosphorus, pharmaceuticals, and heavy metals. This industry, which has largely avoided any regulation by federal environmental laws, has contributed to widespread water impairments with little to no accountability. The Clean Water Act is meant to control this kind of pollution from factory farms and other “point source” dischargers, and that system relies on the monitoring that factory farm permits habitually lack across the country.

Now that a federal Circuit Court has spoken and made clear that these factory farm permits must contain pollution monitoring, dispelling the myth that it’s okay for regulators to just assume compliance with our bedrock water protection laws, we are working in states across the country to implement our win. FWW is currently challenging factory farm permits in Washington State, Colorado, and Montana, and we’re tracking other states while we await EPA’s rewrite of the Idaho permit.

Following this critical win, we will continue fighting for stronger regulation and enforcement across the country to protect our rivers, lakes, and streams from factory farm pollution.

Time to face it —~it’s people or plastics.~We can’t have both.

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