I’ll admit it: As editor of this magazine I have paid attention to treatment technology at the expense of a highly cost-effective alternative for improving water quality.
I’m talking about nutrient trading, often called water quality trading. It’s a way for clean-water agencies to meet increasingly strict permit limits on nitrogen and phosphorus without spending multimillion dollars on new treatment processes.Let’s say a regulatory agency decides that a stream is impaired and that phosphorus inputs need to be reduced. One way to do that is to ratchet down the phosphorus limits in clean-water plants’ effluent permits. Yet often those plants are
