Establishment of Effluent Standards for Industrial Wastewaters in Korea: Current Issues and Suggestions for Future Plan

Abstract

Industrial wastewaters have been strongly controlled by effluent standard. Either water quality-based or technology-based effluent standard could be adopted on the basis of the scientific rationale. Since it is important to set the regulation acceptable to both of environmentalist and developmentalist, reasonable background in areal classification and industrial categorization is required as well as scientific background. This study focused on Korean effluent standards from the past to the future covering how to set the regulation based on the approaches employed in well-developed countries. Except the area where strong protection is required, the regulation should be applied according to the type of discharge, that is, direct or indirect discharge. Industrial categorization should be carried out with the collection of wastewater data to reflect the characteristics of wastewater in the regulation. As a way of improving the allowable level of pollutant discharged, it was proposed that conventional pollutants to follow technology-based standard, whereas toxic pollutants would be appropriate to water quality-based standard. The lognormal distribution based on the effluent concentration data was considered to be reasonable for the regulation of conventional pollutants. The water quality standard implying risk assessment with 10 times dilution ratio was used to derive toxic pollutant standards.