Clean Water Act 1972

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A Review of The Clean Water Act of 1972 In 1972, the Federal Water Pollution Control Act of 1948 was completely rewritten to take on its modern form, known as The Clean Water Act. This change came about from growing public concern over unregulated dumping of waste into waterways, causing two-thirds of the country's lakes, rivers, and coastal waters to become unsafe for recreational activities. The goal of the Clean Water Act is to protect, restore, and maintain the health of the United States waters by establishing a system for regulating the entry of polluting chemicals into the waters as well as regulating water quality standards. When the legislation was passed in 1972, many amendments were made to give the law more power. These amendments …show more content…
Government has funded research regarding the levels of pollutants in all the waters in the country. In one study, it was found that most types of water pollution declined, for example, between 1972 and 2001, the amount of the nation’s waters that met standards for fishing grew by 11%, and dissolved oxygen saturation increased by an average of 5%; similar patterns were observed in well documented networks of a few monitoring sites and in the full sample of 170,000 monitoring sites (Keiser). In addition, numerous studies were published in the 1990’s that supplied evidence for the legislation’s success. One such study indicated that dissolved oxygen concentrations had greatly improved in the Delaware River, and another study stated that fecal coliform counts greatly in the Neches Estuary in Texas had decreased substantially (Andreen). While this trend supports the success the Clean Water Act has had, today over half of the U.S. rivers and streams still violate state water quality standards (USEPA 2016). Before the Clean Water Act was passed, there was little research being done on the quality of the nation’s waters, but our finding of decreases in most pollutants suggests that the degree of violations was greater before the Clean Water Act (Keiser). Today, non-point source pollution is the largest barrier stopping the achievement of national water quality objectives; the states reported in 2000 that 39% of the streams assessed and 45% of lakes assessed failed to meet at least one of their designated uses under the water quality standards program (Andreen), due to the unregulated non-point source pollution discharge. The science examining the effect that the Clean Water Act has had on the quality of the nation’s waters suggests that the legislation is responsible for the decline seen in pollution levels. However, the pollution levels are still higher than the national standard, so some may argue that the Clean
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