I would especially like to welcome Teresa Norberg-King from the Minnesota Environmental Protection Agency. The United States Environmental Protection Agency is a federal agency, that whose goal is to protect human health and safeguard the natural environment. The United States Environmental Protection Agency is a federal agency, that whose goal is to protect human health and safeguard the natural environment. We have a good question from Amy here in Minnesota. Pollution is something that you cannot always see, but in other instances it will be colored water, dead animals.
Pollution is too much of something that causes the water and the organisms in the water to die.
We can measure for chemicals and check the levels if they are safe to be discharged, however, sometimes the waters are discharged and the levels were not safe. Then we can have a problem of pollution. However, there are estimates that over 5,000 new chemicals are developed each year, so we are certainly not going to be able to have good techniques for all those chemicals quickly. We use a variety of techniques to manage those chemicals. We can measure certain ones that may have a greater effect, we can use biological organisms in toxicity tests to be our detector, and EPAs job is to regulate what is discharged into the environment.