WASHINGTON— The Center for Biological Diversity filed a lawsuit today challenging the Environmental Protection Agency’s new water pollution limits for coal-fired power plants.

Today’s suit, filed in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, notes that the EPA rule violated the Clean Water Act and Endangered Species Act with a loophole that allows these facilities to keep discharging heavy metal pollution outside of established technology standards for another decade.

“It’s unacceptable that the EPA is giving the coal industry a free pass to dump millions of pounds of toxic pollution into this nation’s rivers for another 10 years,” said Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center. “Worse yet, this hand-out to the industry will continue to harm hundreds of endangered aquatic species, as the EPA once again thumbs its nose at the Endangered Species Act.”

The water pollution limits, known as Effluent Limitation Guidelines, set technology-based requirements for limiting discharges of toxic heavy metals such as mercury, cadmium and selenium into the nation’s waters. The EPA’s final guidelines established strict discharge limitations but created a loophole that allows any coal-fired power plant that intends to retire by 2034 to continue using cheaper, less effective pollution control technologies.

Coal-fired, steam electric power plants are the largest industrial source of toxic water pollution in the United States, releasing heavy metals like arsenic, lead, mercury and selenium.

Power-plant wastewater discharges cause significant damage to aquatic ecosystems. Dozens of threatened and endangered wildlife species, including sturgeon, hellbender salamanders, sea turtles, fish and freshwater mussels will be harmed by these continued levels of pollution.

Heavy metal pollution from power plants can make it unsafe to eat fish from many rivers and streams, contaminate lakes and rivers where people swim, and increase treatment costs for drinking-water systems. Toxic heavy metals from coal power plant wastewater cause severe human health problems, including cancer, reproductive harms and lowered IQ among children.

“At a time when we should be accelerating the transition to renewable energy, the EPA instead capitulated to the sky-is-falling rhetoric of the coal industry, which values profits over the health of millions of people,” said Hartl. “I hope that the court quickly throws out this terrible loophole and coal-fired power plants finally have their reckoning with the enormous damage their pollution has caused.”

The Center is represented by Claire Tonry with Smith & Lowney PLLC and in-house counsel.