7/17/10 The water board unanimously adopted the permit, which enforces federal guidelines applied to other similar American mills for millions of gallons of wastewater the mill discharges into the ocean every day. Under the new permit, the mill will have to build a secondary treatment facility at a cost of about $26 million to remove pollutants before the wastewater is released. The permit and a cease and desist order from the board impose a timeline on progress toward tightening pollution controls.
The mill must reduce the amount of total suspended solids -- solid material present in the wastewater -- and biological oxygen demand, a measure of how much oxygen is stripped from the water around the outfall pipe that runs 11/4- miles into the ocean. The mill released about 14 million gallons of effluent a day in the last three years of the mill's operation.
