SECTION 5 



COMPARISON OF PRINCIPLES OF DEVELOPMENT AND USE OF WATER QUALITY 

 STANDARDS IN THE USSR AND USA 



L.A. Lesnikov^ 



Practically all nations, which have experienced the negative influence 

 of pollutants from industry and agriculture on bodies of water, have arrived 

 at the need to establish certain standards for these substances which are 

 considered safe for the use of bodies of water (McKee and Wolf, 1963). 



However, in developing biological well-founded standards, a primary dif- 

 ficulty arises: the development of sufficiently well-founded standards is 

 quite cumbersome, while the number of pollutants which may enter bodies of 

 water is quite great. As we learned on a visit to the USA, the "bank of 

 substances" at one laboratory in Cincinnati includes some 25,000 substances. 

 In our country, about 600 sanitary-hygienic maximum permissible concentra- 

 tions (MPC) have been developed for harmful substances, as well as 210 fish- 

 ing industry MPC's. In the USA, judging from the literature which we have 

 examined, reports have been published on the degree of harm of a similar 

 quantity of substances, though as yet this information has primarily been 

 obtained from short-term experiments. Large numbers of substances have been 

 studied in both the USSR and the USA. Summing up all the information which 

 we have available at present, we know of the effect of only about 1,000 sub- 

 stances. 



The following system is used in the USSR. MPC's are the same for all 

 bodies of water in the country, but there are two systems of MPC's: sani- 

 tary-hygienic, approved by the USSR Public Health Ministry, and fishing 

 standards, approved by the Fishing Industry Ministry, USSR. These standards 

 must be maintained by enterprises, beginning at a "measurement line" and be- 

 yond it. For the sanitary-hygienic MPC's, the "measurement line" is 1 km 

 upstream from the nearest point of water use in the case of rivers, or 1 km 

 distant from the nearest point of water use for reservoirs and lakes. For 

 the fishing standards, the "measurement line" is established no more than 

 0.5 km from the source of pollution. 



For each specific enterprise, "discharge norms" or, as they have come to 

 be called in recent years, "maximum permissible discharges" (MPD) are esta- 



^State Scientific Research Institute of Lake, River and Fishing Management, 

 Leningrad, USSR. 



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