A coalition of 10 environmental and public health organizations filed a federal lawsuit last week challenging the Trump administration’s last-minute decision to reverse proposed U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations aimed at curbing pollution from slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants.
Filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, the lawsuit takes aim at the EPA’s August 28th decision to discard rules planned by the last administration that would have, for the first time, imposed limits on phosphorus discharges from 126 meat industry facilities across the country.
The discarded protections would have kept more than eight million pounds of phosphorus, a major contributor to harmful algal blooms, and nine million pounds of nitrogen, bacteria, and industrial waste out of U.S. waterways annually.
Each year, slaughterhouses and meat processing plants in the U.S. release an estimated 112 million pounds of nitrogen and phosphorus pollution. This waste fuels algal blooms that create low-oxygen ‘dead zones,’ killing vast numbers of fish. More than 60 million people, disproportionately low-income communities and people of color, live within one mile of rivers and streams degraded by slaughterhouse pollution.
“EPA is legally obligated to enforce the Clean Water Act but is instead claiming unchecked discretion to ignore its mandates in favor of deregulatory priorities. Allowing slaughterhouses and rendering plants to continue discharging millions of pounds of pollutants each year contradicts the agency’s own findings that the revised standards are needed and would improve water quality, protect public health, and benefit local economies,” said Kelly Hunter Foster, Senior Attorney at Waterkeeper Alliance.
The coalition hopes the court will reinstate stricter pollution controls to safeguard waterways, ecosystems, and communities disproportionately impacted by factory farming operations.
