I'm a 7th grade social studies teacher.  My students are working on a project where they find a problem in society, study it, then make a policy suggestion to the appropriate level of government in an attempt to help solve the initial problem.

One of my classes chose water pollution as their problem.  They decided that mills and factories are the largest polluters and wanted to focus on that.

Could anybody help us find laws on point-source water pollution?  What has happened in the past 20 years?  What do you (people who work in this field) think could be improved upon?  What kind of changes would you like to see? (these suggestions will just get the kids thinking and working in the right direction.)

Thank you in advance for any suggestions and help you can give us.  Please note that I may give students access to this blog so that they can comment back to you personally.

Sincerely,

Heather Tomchek, New Holstein, WI

Heather Tomchek
7th Grade Teacher

Your City may have a Industrial Pretreatment Program. This monitors what is dumped into sewers that could cause problems with sewer plants, or pass through of a pollutant.

Point sources should be easy, they will have permits that will be in the public domain.

Mark

Ms Tomchek:

First and foremost, I would like to thank you personally for being a teacher, for taking the time and effort to instruct our little ones, and to direct them in such a great fashion.  Now that I have these formalities out of the way, here is my perspective on your questions.  You may want to redirect your focus on such a broad issue and attempt to narrow it down from a global issue to something that your students may not only recognize but be able to comprehend, apply, and how these issues affect their own neighborhoods.  Since you are situated in Wisconsin, land of cheese, dairy farms, the Great Lakes, and cold winters you may want to exert these great minds to attempt to figure out how to deal with dairy farm pollution.  This pollution encompasses not only air pollution (methane, ammonia), but water (groundwater contamination from NO2,NO3--blue baby syndrome), wastewater (runoff from farmland (herbicides, pesticides, fertilizers), and lastly, what do you do with cow manure?  I know, there are various governmental entities that address these issues such as EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), State government (DHS--Department of Health Services), and perhaps city government such as pretreatment programs.  EPA recently issue an edict for CAFO's (Confined Animal Feeding Operations) which addresses some of the pollution issues associated with such operations:

http://www.epa.gov/oecaagct/anafoidx.html

You may also want to view issues with groundwater contamination from CAFO's:

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=DGUS,DGUS:2006-14,DGUS:en&q=groundwater+contamination+CAFO

You may also want to narrow your queries to a water/wastewater entity devoted to Wisconsin such as Central States Water Environment Association members:

http://www.cswea.org/

More than likely, you will be receiving quite a bit on input on your posting.

E. coli happens!

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