WASHINGTON— The Environmental Protection Agency announced a final rule today that will allow ships to continue releasing harmful concentrations of invasive species and disease organisms into U.S. waters.

The rule keeps in place ballast water discharge standards that the courts have already determined violate the Clean Water Act.

“I’m extremely frustrated that despite years of effort and court rulings, our marine ecosystems and public health are still being hurt by this kind of weak rule,” said Miyoko Sakashita, oceans program director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The EPA has had half a century to take action on harmful invasive discharge but in five whole decades hasn’t gotten it right. Meanwhile ships keep spewing out potentially threatening water from far-flung places every day.”

Ships take up and discharge ballast water to improve stability, but the water carries nonnative species and human and animal pathogens from around the world. Biological pollutants introduced to the United States by ballast water have damaged ecosystems, made people sick, and harmed the economy.

“The EPA continues to allow the shipping industry to wreak havoc on our oceans, coastlines, and communities with the release of this weak and inadequate rule,” said Marcie Keever, oceans and vessels program director at Friends of the Earth. “Polluted and toxic ship discharges — including everything from ballast water pathogens to bacteria-laden graywater and acidic exhaust gas scrubber wastewater — should not be tolerated by an agency tasked with enforcing the Clean Water Act. Yet again EPA has failed to protect people, the economy, wildlife and habitats from harmful vessel pollution with this rulemaking.”

The Clean Water Act, passed in 1972, requires the EPA to regulate pollution discharges into U.S. waters. But the agency illegally exempted ballast water discharges from any regulation for 36 years. During that time those discharges released numerous invasive species into the United States, including zebra and quagga mussels in the Great Lakes, a destructive Asian clam in San Francisco Bay, and a fatal, pandemic strain of cholera in Gulf Coast waters.

A series of lawsuits forced the agency to set standards for ballast discharges in 2013. But in 2015 the 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals held that the standards the EPA had set did not meet the minimum requirements of the Clean Water Act and directed it to develop new standards. Congress ordered the EPA to finalize new standards by December 2020, but the release has been repeatedly postponed under the Biden administration.

In February 2023 the Center for Biological Diversity and Friends of the Earth, represented by the Stanford Environmental Law Clinic, sued the EPA for failing to finalize standards. In response, in September 2023, the agency agreed to release final standards by Sept. 24, 2024.

The U.N. Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services reported that aquatic invasive species have cost the world more than $100 billion annually.