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(CN) — Five environmental groups are taking on the Trump administration over a recent decision to cancel protections aimed at reducing pollution from slaughterhouses and meat processing plants, which often contaminate rivers, lakes and streams.
“The Trump administration’s decision to withdraw these lifesaving pollution-reduction measures is not just unlawful, it’s incredibly nasty,” said Hannah Connor, environmental health deputy director at the Center for Biological Diversity, in a written statement.
“The U.S. meat industry slaughters some 18,000 animals every minute, creating a waste stream full of blood, fecal bacteria and disease-causing pathogens that adds up to one of our country’s largest industrial sources of nutrient pollution," she added. “Now Trump’s EPA is killing a rule designed to curb discharges of that nasty wastewater into our rivers and streams and safeguard people and wildlife. This lawless administration is putting industry profits ahead of protecting kids from swimming in this gross pollution.”
The challenge comes in the form of a petition to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to review the decision, made earlier this month, “not to finalize revised effluent limitation guidelines or promulgate pretreatment standards for the Meat and Poultry Products industrial point source category.”
The petitioners in the case filed Monday include Cape Fear River Watch, Rural Empowerment Association for Community Help, Waterkeepers Alliance, Humane World for Animals, Food & Water Watch, Environment America, Center for Biological Diversity, and Animal Legal Defense Fund.
According to the Center for Biological Diversity, slaughterhouses and meat processing plants in the U.S. discharge roughly 112 million pounds of nitrogen and phosphorus pollution, which feed algae blooms and reduce oxygen in parts of waterways, killing fish.
The protections, put forward by the Environmental Protection Agency during the Biden administration, would have placed limits on phosphorus pollution from 126 meat industry plants, cutting at least 8 million pounds of phosphorous pollution per year, as well as 9 million pounds of nitrogen, fecal bacteria and grease.
In its withdrawal statement issued earlier this month, the EPA said that in the agency’s judgement, “it is not appropriate to impose additional regulation on the MPP industry, given administration priorities and policy concerns, including protecting food supply and mitigating inflationary prices for American consumers following a protracted period of high inflation from 2020 through 2024.”
According to the petitioners, “fewer than 1% of all the meat-processing facilities would face economic stress by upgrading their pollution-control systems.”
The EPA said that although the new regulations would improve water quality, it would force the industry to use more energy, thus burning more greenhouse gasses, and produce more solid waste, which would end up in landfills.
Tom Pelton, a spokesman for the Environmental Integrity Project said in an email: “For the Trump administration to claim that they are concerned about the greenhouse gas emissions from the water pollution control systems is hard to believe, especially because the Trump EPA recently announced it would halt its program for industries to even report their greenhouse gas emissions.”
The EPA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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