No abstract

Water pollution is perceived by the general public to be of increasing concern as a major problem facing the state. From a survey of a representative sample of adults in Wisconsin, it was shown that the public has rather definite ideas about what constitutes a description of pollution. The respondents mentioned algae and murky, dark water but did not often mention attributes such as chemicals or disease germs that are not detected by the human sensory system. When the respondents were asked to name water in the state that they felt was polluted, they named waters that in fact have the characteristics they described when defining pollution. The most widely used indicators of water pollution seem insufficient in light of the public definition of, and concern about, water pollution.

A study of lakeshore property values in which land and improvement values were regressed against attributes of the site and lake to determine the importance of the various characteristics in predicting property values indicates that swampy or steeply sloped banks are negatively correlated with value, whereas water quality, proximity to population centers, and the presence of many other lakes in the area are positively related to value. No significant relationships were discovered between land values and the amount of public land in the vicinity or the degree of fluctuation in the lake level. Property values approximately doubled in the ten‐year period of the study. By suggesting characteristics that seem to be in greater demand, the study provides information to guide some of the decisions about where to spend the limited public budget for waterfront recreational facilities.

No abstract

This paper explores the trends in industrial water intake, discharge, recycling, and gross water use to see whether or not the 1972 Clean Water Act (CWA) has had an impact on industrial effluent discharge. Quinquennial Census data indicate that the levels of discharge, both generally and per unit of product, have been falling for as long as these data have been gathered. Trends in gross water use and recycling ratios suggest that during the 25 years of record production processes were gradually modified so that less total water was discharged and less was used per unit of output. Untreated discharge as a percent of all discharge fell fairly steadily across all industries until 1973 and continued to fall in 1978 in the major BOD‐discharging industries. By 1978, 75 percent of the pulp and paper effluent and 40 percent of the food processing effluent was treated. The consistent increase in treated discharge in the pulp and paper mills, with their large component of BOD‐related process discharge, was not matched by parallel trends in the steel, petroleum, and chemicals industries with their relatively smaller amounts (and percents) of process discharge. This suggests that the CWA may have been responsible in part for the change in the former. In the pulp and paper industry, there is further evidence that the CWA has influenced wastewater discharge. Although, for the century as a whole, pulp and paper mills discharged less water, and more discharge was treated, in 1978 than in 1973, these trends were especially dramatic among firms in the Northeast where controls were likely to have been most stringent. Finally, using the only direct evidence we have, it appears that the drop in discharge levels and the increasing amounts of treatment had a significant effect on the amount of BOD discharged to surface and ground water. In 1973 the pulp and paper mills in Wisconsin discharged an average of about 868,000 lbs/day; by 1982, despite increased levels of production, they discharged less than 10 percent of that. There is no doubt that industrial water use changed over the 25 years of record. Although the evidence is circumstantial, it appears that the CWA and the environmental ethic which spawned it played an important part in some aspects of the shifts.