North Carolina city accused of discharging toxic chemicals in drinking water

In North Carolina, the city of Asheboro has been accused of allowing the discharge of carcinogenic chemicals into the drinking water of thousands of its residents. A legal suit presented by environmental groups stated that the city’s wastewater treatment plant has been discharging for at least a decade 1,4-dioxane into Haskett Creek, upstream of drinking water supplies. The substance was contained in the wastewater of plastic manufacturer StarPet and other industrial companies, which were allowed by city authorities to send it to the wastewater plant. There, the contaminated wastewater was discharged into the creek and ended up polluting downstream drinking water supplies. According to environmentalists, local communities are detecting 1,4-dioxane in their drinking water well above the cancer risk advisory levels set by the US Environmental Protection Agency. Conventional water treatments cannot remove the chemical, so it penetrates deeply into the drinking water system, reaching homes, businesses, and schools.
The suit aims to obligate Asheboro city authorities and StarPet under the Clean Water Act to pretreat water to ensure pollution is controlled before it reaches the municipal drinking water system. Neither the city nor Indorama Ventures, the owner of StarPet, has commented on the issue so far.