I called Ray Drew at Water Pollution Control A? (authority?) in Torrington. EPA (Federal Regulations) are STUPID!!!
It doesn’t matter if we process a Trillion gallons of water daily or 1 gallon daily we are only allowed to release 248 pounds of Nitrogen daily (90,000 annually) and 17.3 pounds of Phosphorus daily (6730 annually).
Why isn’t it a percentage of the total 15,000,000,000 (15 billion) pounds of water we process annually? We average 41,000,000 gallons of water daily to pass through our water treatment plant. But if it were 10 times more water or ten times less water the amount of phosphorus and nitrogen allowed to pass through the facility is the same.
Ever wonder why our cars all have 1.6 liter motors or larger while cars in other countries have much, much smaller motors? Our Federal EPA requires a percentage of the pollutants to be removed from the emissions, the exact opposite of what they require for water pollution control. If we could keep a fixed number of pollutants per vehicle, or per passenger, or per weight, we could have much smaller engines, better gas milage, more efficiency. But because the EPA requires a percentage of the emissions to be cleaned we need bigger motors to drive the emissions cleaning equipment.