United States: for the people who run the plant

What the public record says about your plant, and where it is likely wrong.

What is driving spend

We read 5,677 Clean Water SRF project entries across 39 states and matched them to live NPDES permits for design flow. In practice these intended use plans and priority lists name the applicant, the project and the amount, and most carry some indication of readiness. That makes them the closest thing there is to a public schedule of who is about to build.

Overlaying that with EPA's quarterly non-compliance record gives the set that actually matters: 81 plants that are lagoon-based, inside 5 MGD, queued for funding, and carrying reported effluent limit violations in the last three years.

You already know your plant better than any national dataset does. The value of a dataset like this is the opposite direction: it tells you how your plant looks from outside, to a regulator, a funder or a vendor who has never visited.

What EPA's record says about you, in plain terms

The quarterly non-compliance record counts E90 violations, reported discharge monitoring values outside a permit limit. Worth knowing precisely: the 90 is EPA's code for "DMR, limited, numeric violation", not a severity percentage. It is a count of times a reported number fell outside a limit, and funders read it as such.

Across the plants we examined, 81 are lagoon-based, inside 5 MGD, on a state funding list, and carrying reported limit violations in the last three years. That combination is what draws attention.

What else is in your sewer changes the answer

A plant is not just its population, and the national datasets mostly cannot see this. Three things move the nutrient picture more than headcount does:

• Significant industrial users. Food processing, dairy, meat packing and brewing put high-strength, high-nitrogen loads into small plants. A town of 2,000 with a creamery behaves like a town of 20,000. An approved pretreatment programme is the public marker that such users exist. Plenty of small systems carry one large contributor without ever having formalised a programme, so absence of the marker proves nothing.
• Agricultural load. CAFOs and irrigation return flows are nutrient sources in their own right and shape what the receiving water will accept.
• Combined sewers and infiltration. Flow that swings with rainfall changes what any treatment addition has to survive, and wet-weather capital usually competes with nutrient capital for the same money.

We flag these where the public record shows them. It is worth saying that the record is thin: of the small lagoon plants we examined, only a handful carry a formal pretreatment programme, while many more almost certainly have an industrial contributor. If your plant does, that is the first thing anyone analysing you from outside will have missed.

Absence of a record is not compliance

A number of plants have no quarterly history on file at all. That is a reporting gap, not a clean bill of health, and it is worth knowing which one you are before someone else interprets it for you.

What your permit says you discharge into, and whether it still carries what it did

EPA names the receiving water on the permit, so this part is read from the record rather than inferred. Across the plants we matched: 601 discharge to a river, 502 to a creek or brook, 177 to a tributary with no name of its own, and 47 to a ditch or drain. That is 726 plants, just under half of those whose receiving water is named, discharging to water with very little capacity to dilute anything.

That distinction does more work than plant size. A kilogram of nitrogen into an unnamed tributary and the same kilogram into a major river are not the same event, and a limit written against the first is written against almost no assimilative capacity at all.

We then measured drought at each plant's coordinates with Earth Engine, graded on Palmer's published scale rather than a threshold we picked. 122 plants discharge to a small water, sit in moderate drought or worse, and already carry reported limit violations. If your permit was written against a flow the creek no longer reliably carries, that is worth raising before it is raised with you.