Toxic pollution poses an unseen threat to human health and life forms of every kind. Wherever toxic materials are found—whether as pesticides sprayed on fields, at illegal dump sites, discharged directly into streams, or emitted as air pollution—the end result is that water becomes contaminated. Toxic contamination in water, however, often does not stay in the ambient water but, instead, moves into sediments and becomes a part of the food web, in the tissue of animals both small and large.

Toxic chemicals often attach themselves to small particles of soil that accumulate at the bottoms of rivers. These contaminated sediments move downstream, accumulating in areas based on currents. They move more quickly when storms and waves from ships, dredging, and construction work flush them out. On the river bottom, contaminated sediments are eaten by bottom-dwelling fish such as carp and sturgeon. They are also consumed by small river-bottom insects that are food for small fish which, in turn, are caught by people, birds, and animals such as mink, otter, salmon, seals, eagles, osprey, and orca whales.

Toxics can kill immediately or over time, through a wide variety of cancers and chronic diseases. In aquatic species, such as salmon, toxic effects include behavioral changes that pose a risk to survival. For example, copper causes salmon to stop avoiding predators and affects the sense of smell that is necessary for them to return to spawn where they were hatched. Arsenic causes adverse effects on virtually every human organ that has been evaluated, including: cardiovascular disease, skin lesions, decreased lung function, peripheral nerve damage, neurobehavioral alterations in children, and cancers of the skin, bladder, lung, liver, kidney, and prostate. Every toxic chemical has its own path, its own persistence in the environment, and its own damage left behind.

There are tens of thousands of toxic pollution chemicals but only a relative handful are regulated, whether they are pesticides developed specifically to kill plants and animals or chemicals that are intended to make life more convenient even as they poison us. What limited regulation we have is more likely to work when toxic pollution is already detected at unsafe levels rather than to prevent the problem in the first place. So, for example, we have years of Oregon governments crowing about the historic clean-up of the Willamette River yet today the Portland Harbor in the lower river is a Superfund site.

We have measured toxic effects on fish and marine mammals in Puget Sound but almost no restrictions on chemicals in the permits that govern discharges from cities and industries. Toxic pollution effects often happen at toxic levels that are well below our ability to measure them in the environment. Combined with ever decreasing budgets for monitoring toxics in the environment means that our federal environmental laws like the Clean Water Act fail to protect human health and other species from toxic pollution.

NWEA works to make the regulatory system work better to protect people and the environment from toxics. From forcing state and federal agencies to adopt more protective water quality standards, focusing on threatened and endangered species and pesticides, improving water discharge permitting, and seeking restrictions on farming and logging that release toxics from soil into streams and rivers, NWEA addresses toxic pollution throughout its work.

In 2023 Northwest Environmental Advocates and the Center for Biological Diversity have petitioned the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to update the Clean Water Act’s Toxic Pollutant List to which no pollutants have been added for 47 years. This, despite a Congressional directive that EPA add chemicals to the list from “time to time.” The Toxic Pollutant List drives the law’s pollution control requirements to curtail toxics in the nation’s waters. But, as the result of EPA’s failure to update the list, most of the thousands of chemicals used in today’s manufacturing, offices, and homes—that end up in lakes, rivers, and streams—are not regulated. As of August 2024, EPA has yet to give us a formal response.