Environmental groups sue EPA over water pollution standards

More than a dozen environmental groups are suing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for not revising its water pollution-control standards, which regulate the amount of harmful chemicals that can be dumped into rivers, lakes and streams. The groups claim the current standards haven’t been updated in decades, which violates the Clean Water Act. Oil refineries, chemical and plastic plants, and other industrial facilities “dump billions of gallons of wastewater that contain nitrogen that fuels algae blooms and dead zones and toxins that are harmful to both humans and aquatic life like benzene and selenium,” said Jen Duggan, deputy director for the Environmental Integrity Project, one of the groups that’s suing the agency.