Alan Ismond

The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality will soon be issuing new effluent discharge permits for seafood processing plants in Oregon.

Some facilities have been waiting for new individual permits since 2011. In the intervening years, the Department of Environmental Quality was sued by a nongovernmental organization for not keeping up with the required permit renewals. Unfortunately, the department had been — and still is — understaffed, underfunded and had lost most of their institutional knowledge related to the seafood processing industry.

That’s the bad news. Here is the good news.

Over the last five to 10 years, and with no guidance from the Department of Environmental Quality and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the seafood processing industry has researched and tested various process water treatment systems.

The goal was to maximize the recovery of the landed seafood resource without compromising the usefulness of the recovered products. One processor is currently testing a newly patented byproduct recovery system. A feasibility study is currently underway looking at treating the combined effluent from several seafood plants at a central location. A centralized byproduct recovery center would capitalize on the economies of scale and be staffed with skilled operators.

The Department of Environmental Quality, on the other hand, intends to set limits for pollutants that are ubiquitous in the environment and are not added or used in the making of seafood products. This makes the seafood plants financially responsible for remediating contaminants that were originally discharged — and are still being discharged — by other industries. It would make more sense to control these pollutants at the source, where pollutant abatement technology is most efficient rather than at the downstream industries that neither use nor add the contaminant during processing.

The seafood industry is prepared to meet the challenge of recovering more usable products and byproducts in a way that preserves the environment and maximizes the use of the harvested resource.

The Department of Environmental Quality and EPA can do their part by issuing S.A.F.E. permits — scientifically based limits using available technology that is financially feasible and environmentally protective.