EPA Official Visits Oregon to Present National Pretreatment Award to Clean Water Services

Hillsboro, OR — January 7, 2002 — Randy Smith, Director of the U.S. Environmental Protection (EPA) Region 10 Office of Water will present EPA's 2001 First Place National Pretreatment Award to Clean Water Services at 10 a.m. on Tuesday, January 8 in the Shirley Huffman Auditorium of the Public Services Building in Hillsboro, Oregon. The presentation will be followed by a reception at the Clean Water Services Water Quality Lab and a tour for Smith, DEQ officials, industrial representatives and the Board of Directors.

EPA recognized Clean Water Services for "the innovative and effective approaches" the District has employed to protect water quality, public health and the public wastewater facilities in the Tualatin Basin. Clean Water Services (formerly Unified Sewerage Agency) also won the national first place award in 1995.

The award recognized Clean Water Services' Source Control and Laboratory Services Divisions. These Divisions:

• permit and monitor 160 industrial customers, including 59 "significant industrial users";
• respond to more than 60 water quality investigations annually;
• work with regional partners to establish the Pollution Prevention Outreach Team (P2O) and EcoBiz program to actively work with businesses and industries to prevent pollution from being created.
• provide technical assistance to commercial/industrial facilities on the maintenance of their storm and sewer system;
• and complete more than 200,000 lab analyses a year.

The national award recognizes publicly owned treatment facilities with "exemplary" local pretreatment programs. There are more than 16,000 publicly owned wastewater treatment facilities.

Criteria used to judge the award included enforcement; environmental achievements; industrial use monitoring, innovations in program implementation; and public outreach.

Industrial pretreatment is critical to the protection of wastewater treatment facilities, public health and water quality. Clean Water Services Source Control and Laboratory staff work closely with local industry and DEQ to ensure wastewater discharged to the public sewer system meet strict national, state and local standards. District staff permit and monitor such diverse industries as Intel Corporation, Reser's Fine Foods, Merix Corporation, Beaverton Foods, Pacific Foods, Integrated Device Technologies (IDT), Westak of Oregon, and Gray and Company .

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