As used in this report, guidelines refer to threshold values that have no regulatory status but are issued in an advisory capacity. In the tables accompanying this report and in the specific descriptions of individual standards and guidelines, the actual terms used by the issuing agencies are listed. Thus, States are required to adopt regulations or statutes that contain legally achievable criteria. This public notice and comment requirement is a substantive difference between EPA criteria and the other guidelines addressed in this report. The regulatory status of each set of standards or guidelines addressed in this report is provided in table 1.
Many States use Federal guidelines as the basis for State standards.
Federal guidelines generally are designed to protect human health, aquatic organisms, or wildlife, and do not reflect factors such as economic feasibility or analytical detection limit. All are established by EPA's Office of Water. A related set of guidelines is called EPA fish- tissue concentrations. EPA fish tissue concentrations are an intermediate calculation in the derivation of EPA ambient water-quality criteria for human health. EPA defined screening values as concentrations of target analytes in fish and shellfish tissues that are of public health concern and that are used as standards against which levels of contamination in similar tissue collected from the ambient environment can be compared.