Conservationists waging a decade-long legal battle to force the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate ship ballast water just like any other pollutant are headed back to court.
Environmentalists last summer won a drawn-out lawsuit forcing the EPA to regulate ballast water under the Clean Water Act, and the EPA has responded to that court order by requiring ships to flush their ballast tanks in mid-ocean to expel any unwanted organisms.
That does not go far enough, according to the conservation groups that filed suit Monday. They note that ballast tank flushing is already required for ships entering the Great Lakes, but it isn't effective enough to protect the lakes or the nation's coastal waters.
The Great Lakes are now home to more than 180 invasive species, and the overwhelming majority of invasions in the past few decades have arrived as stowaways in ship-steadying ballast tanks.
Nina Bell, executive director of Oregon-based Northwest Environmental Advocates, one of the plaintiffs in the new lawsuit, said the EPA is giving the shipping industry "a free ride at the expense of the environment and taxpayers."
"Not only did EPA pass up this tremendous opportunity to protect the country from invasive species discharged in ships' ballast water, it violated the Clean Water Act at the same time," Deborah Silvas, director of the Stanford Law School Environmental Clinic, said in a statement. "The law does not allow EPA to do what's politically expedient; it requires what is necessary to protect our waters."