Clear Water Farms

Clear Water Farms

Regulating agricultural pollution is both difficult and contentious. US EPA has left this burden to state governments, and the pursuit of special interests from farmer associations hinder any real progress. Mississippi River Collaborative specializes in the enforcement of the Clean Water Act, but since agricultural pollution is exempt from CWA regulations, MRC must seek out […]

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Iowa Rejects Request for Lake Protections

Last week, Iowa’s Environmental Protection Commission chose to reject a petition from MRC member group Iowa Environmental Council (IEC) that asked for better water quality protections for Iowa’s recreational lakes. Iowa has 160 recreational lakes. In the last 12 years, IDNR has closed the state’s beaches nearly 200 times because of harmful algal blooms (HABs) […]

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Link between Gulf’s Dead Zone and Florida’s Red Tide

“[I]t’s like all the waters [from the Mississippi River] are moving to the east.” Robert Arnone is a Mississippi River professor who analyzes water flow into and around the Gulf of Mexico. For nearly half a year, the waters of the Gulf have been pushing eastward, contributing to the devastating Red Tide that has decimated […]

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MRC Group Forces Permit Revision

One of the Mississippi River Collaborative’s fundamental objectives is the oversight of state regulation of the Clean Water Act. All too often, permits to discharge pollutants into beautiful lakes and rivers are approved by regulatory agencies without meeting water quality standards. It then falls to environmental groups to step up on behalf of residents to […]

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Un-Mucking Illinois’ Waterways

Environmental groups have settled long-running litigation against the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago (MWRD) over pollution from three of its Chicago-area sewage treatment plants.  The agreement requires the parties to work together to curb phosphorous discharges from the plants that are fueling algae blooms and lowering water quality in the Chicago River system […]

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MRC Org Reaches Settlement with EPA

St. Louis, MO: The Missouri Coalition for the Environment (MCE) settled a lawsuit on December 7, 2016 with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regarding its mandatory duty to issue effective nitrogen and phosphorus standards for lakes in Missouri. “The establishment of nutrient standards for lakes is an important step toward thorough protections of our irreplaceable […]

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Toxic Algae Persists, but No “Official” Measurement of Dead Zone This Year

On July 29, NOAA announced cancellation of the annual measurement of the Gulf Coast Dead Zone for the first time in 27 years, despite issuing a dire projection of its size earlier in the summer. Since 1985, Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium has conducted an annual measurement of the size of the Dead Zone, an area […]

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Nitrogen & Phosphorus Pollution Worse, Not Better

It has been almost 20 years since the Mississippi River/Gulf of Mexico Hypoxia Task Force (HTF) was created to reduce, mitigate, and control hypoxia in the region, and over a year since its major deadline – to shrink the Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico by 45% by 2015 – came and went. But not only […]

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A Clean Water Win in Iowa

Two of the Mississippi River Collaborative’s member organizations celebrated a recent win for clean water. An Iowa District Court sided with the Iowa Environmental Council and the Environmental Law & Policy Center when it ruled the Iowa DNR failed to appropriately enforce the state’s clean water anti-degradation standards when it approved a wastewater treatment project that […]

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MRC Group Files Lawsuit Against EPA

St. Louis, MO: The Missouri Coalition for the Environment (MCE), a member of the Mississippi River Collaborative, has filed a lawsuit alleging the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) violated its mandatory duty to issue effective nutrient standards under the Clean Water Act for lakes in Missouri. Nutrients, primarily nitrogen and phosphorus, are among the biggest polluters […]

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