Establishment of Effluent Standards for Industrial Wastewaters in Korea: Current Issues and Suggestions for Future Plan

ABSTRACT Industrial wastewaters have been strongly controlled by effluent standard. Either water quality-based or technology-based effluent standard could be adopted on the basis of the scientific rationale. Since it is important to set the regulation acceptable to both of environmentalist and developmentalist, reasonable background in areal classification and industrial categorization is required as well as scientific background. This study focused on Korean effluent standards from the past to the future covering how to set the regulation based on the approaches employed in well-developed countries. Except the area where strong protection is required, the regulation should be applied according to the type of discharge, that is, direct or indirect discharge. Industrial categorization should be carried out with the collection of wastewater data to reflect the characteristics of wastewater in the regulation. As a way of improving the allowable level of pollutant discharged, it was proposed that conventional pollutants to follow technology-based standard, whereas toxic pollutants would be appropriate to water quality-based standard. The lognormal distribution based on the effluent concentration data was considered to be reasonable for the regulation of conventional pollutants. The water quality standard implying risk assessment with 10 times dilution ratio was used to derive toxic pollutant standards.

Journal of Water and Environment Technology, Vol 8, No.3, 2010 Establishment of Effluent Standards for Industrial Wastewaters in Korea: Current Issues and Suggestions for Future Plan Ijung KIM*, Sung-Hoon HONG**, Jin-Young JUNG*** * Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering, University of Texas at Austin,1 University Station, Austin, Texas, U.S.A ** Environment Division, Korea Institute of Science and Technology, 39-1 Hawolgok-Dong, Seongbuk-Gu, Seoul 136-791, Republic of Korea *** Department of Environmental Engineering, Yeungnam University, 214-1 Dae-Dong, Gyeongsan-Si, Gyeongsangbuk-Do 712-749, Republic of Korea ABSTRACT Industrial wastewaters have been strongly controlled by effluent standard Either water quality-based or technology-based effluent standard could be adopted on the basis of the scientific rationale Since it is important to set the regulation acceptable to both of environmentalist and developmentalist, reasonable background in areal classification and industrial categorization is required as well as scientific background This study focused on Korean effluent standards from the past to the future covering how to set the regulation based on the approaches employed in well-developed countries Except the area where strong protection is required, the regulation should be applied according to the type of discharge, that is, direct or indirect discharge Industrial categorization should be carried out with the collection of wastewater data to reflect the characteristics of wastewater in the regulation As a way of improving the allowable level of pollutant discharged, it was proposed that conventional pollutants to follow technology-based standard, whereas toxic pollutants would be appropriate to water quality-based standard The lognormal distribution based on the effluent concentration data was considered to be reasonable for the regulation of conventional pollutants The water quality standard implying risk assessment with 10 times dilution ratio was used to derive toxic pollutant standards Keywords: effluent standard, technology-based, water quality-based INTRODUCTION Though industrial development has led to economically affluent society, environmental problems such as climate change and shortage of water supply, have been returned Since industrial wastewater is one of the representative point sources, its portion in overall water pollution is significant in terms of the quality as well as the quantity The most common way to manage industrial wastewater is to apply environmental regulations such as effluent standards Although most developing countries are applying effluent standards along with water quality standards to monitor the quality of the watershed, many of those are not from their own effluent guideline, but just from other countries’ standards (Ragas et al., 2005) As a legal enforcement, effluent standards have been designed to regulate the end-of-pipe wastewater dischargers However, simply cutting down the allowable concentration of the pollutants in wastewater is considered to be costly and temporarily expedient (Abou-Elela et al., 2007), even if it might guarantee a better water quality Address correspondence to Jin-Young Jung, Department of Environmental Engineering, Yeungnam University, Email: jinjung@ynu.ac.kr Received December 30, 2009, Accepted March 30, 2010 - 151 - Journal of Water and Environment Technology, Vol 8, No.3, 2010 Therefore, the regulations are required to be reviewed regularly to achieve a consented control and to show continuously changing situations In the case of U.S., the scheduling and implementing of annual review for the effluent standard are imposed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) As stringent regulations could be applied by the technological advancement in wastewater technology (Jaffe et al., 2002), the revision of the effluent standards is facing new aspects in terms of treatability with reasonable basis Especially, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has been encouraged to use the best available techniques to prevent water pollution (OECD, 1999) The regulation covers a complexity of various elements including discharging area, type of discharge, and kind of industry Therefore, the need for a simplified effluent guideline has been suggested (De La O et al., 1994) By selecting critical variables to be considered in setting effluent standards, effluent guidelines could be organized in a less complicated form This approach would be beneficial to other developing countries as well In Korea, although the effluent standard went through several revisions, reasonable basis of the regulation has not been established yet As an effort of setting the regulation based on treatability, it is required to collect wastewater data as much as possible In this study, the approach in setting the effluent standards with a limited data set obtained so far according to the kind of pollutants and industries was investigated This paper focused on the current state of effluent standards in Korea and the considerations to be used in revising effluent standards and the framework referring to the cases of developed countries The purpose of this study is to set up the acceptable level of effluent standards with scientific basis and to suggest a direction of the effluent guidelines which can make industrial point sources scattered all over the country gather into public wastewater treatment plants, resulting in a better control of individual wastewater dischargers METHODS Bases of effluent standard In general, water quality standard is set prior to effluent standard because the cleaner the effluent, the cleaner would be the water systems Water quality standard starts from water quality criteria based on risk assessment The United States EPA proposed the process of setting water quality criteria concerning both human health (US EPA, 2000) and aquatic life (US EPA, 1996) For human health, risk assessment is applied differently according to the carcinogenicity of the pollutant Reference dose is used as an important parameter in the derivation of safe concentration in case of carcinogens, whereas another concern on non-carcinogens is to evaluate the reference source contribution For aquatic life, the determination criteria are highly dependent on acute and chronic toxicity data provided by an officially approved database system such as Ecotox (US EPA, 2008) To get more reliable criteria, it is crucial to collect sufficient data from various taxonomical groups such as fish, daphnia and algae From the criteria derived by risk assessment, water quality standards can be adjusted by the regional classification, that is, the designated use of a specific watershed - 152 - Journal of Water and Environment Technology, Vol 8, No.3, 2010 After confirming the water quality standard, effluent standard can be set according to dilution ratio, treatability, economic feasibility, and other factors Two kinds of approaches in setting effluent standard are water quality-based approach and technology-based approach Water quality-based approach The key components in water quality-based approach are water quality standards and models As mentioned above, the methodology to set the water quality standards contains the principle of risk assessment Scientific data of bio-assay rather than industry data should be gathered In risk assessment, acute and chronic toxicity can be represented as LC50 (median lethal concentration) / EC50 (median effective concentration) and NOEC (no observed effect concentration), respectively The toxic effect onto human and aquatic life is evaluated separately Considering toxic effect and data collection, this approach is better applied to toxic pollutants Safety factor in the range of 10-1,000 is used in EU (EU, 2000) and Australia (ANZECC, 2000) The calculation of the water quality criteria is shown in equation (1) W ater Q uality C riteria = LC 50 , E C 50 or N O E C U ncertainty factor (10~1,000) (1) Water quality standards are determined through the water quality criteria In Korea, water quality standards were set up by considering the drinking water standards and the economical and technical availability Because water quality standards express the quantified level of water quality, appropriate selection of models can guarantee the water quality-based effluent standard According to the characteristics of watershed, various models can be applied The simplest model comes from the following equation (Ross, 1994) C2 = (F1 + F2 )  C -F1  C F2 (2) where, F1 : upstream flow F2 : discharge flow C1 : concentration in upstream C2 : concentration in discharge (effluent standard) C3 : concentration in downstream (water quality standard) Technology-based approach Acknowledging the limitation of treatment technology, technology-based approach has appeared in view of treatability In developed countries such as US and EU countries, technology-based approach was adopted as a feasible way in social, economical and technical compromise (US EPA, 1996; EU, 1996) Technology-based approach is often referred to as the best available technology (BAT) approach This approach is being used in the EU and US What is important in BAT approach is the thorough analysis of the industry including treatment facilities, as well as effluent characteristics Though it is desirable in long-term, it takes too much time and effort making it difficult to apply in developing countries Using the easily assessable data which is the concentration in the effluent, the logical argument could be established by a statistical support Statistical approach (Wheatland, 1972) was found to be required in setting the effluent standards - 153 - Journal of Water and Environment Technology, Vol 8, No.3, 2010 of a sewage treatment plant Regression of the effluent data could be a key concept in setting the effluent standards (Kahn and Rubin, 1989) To derive the effluent standards by the technology-based approach, the effluent quality from wastewater treatment should be monitored and recorded to be converted into a concentration-frequency graph which can be assumed as a probability distribution such as normal, lognormal or delta-lognormal distribution Through statistical analysis, effluent standard by technology-based approach is determined In the US, lognormal distribution or delta distribution which shows reasonably good fit to various effluent data, has been used in the calculation of the effluent standard The approach by effluent data and statistical fitting can be used to suggest practical level of effluent standard rather than the required one The 95th percentile approach (Crain, 1995) has been used to derive monthly average effluent standard in the US Combining both approaches can be a good solution to set the effluent standard in develo ping countries (Ragas et al., 2005) Wherever Total Maximum Daily Loads (TMDL) is established, the water quality-based approach employed by US EPA (US EPA , 1991) can be applied Although water quality-based approach is sufficient only to keep the water quality standard, it can impose overburden with individual treatment facility, even to economically infeasible level Therefore, technology-based approach can be a c omplement to water-quality based approach The important concept of technology-base d approach is to set the level of effluent standard so that the treatment facility can meet t he regulation Each effluent standard derived from both approaches is compared to determine which value or range is reasonable to satisfy water quality standard and technologically feasible level Unless the safety of water quality is guaranteed, the regulation could rely on water-quality based approach with the benefit/cost analysis which helps the decision-maker to predict the result of regulation (Arrow et al., 2008) Through social compliance to the degree which the stakeholders can agree with, effluent standard can be finally confirmed So far, effluent standard in Korea is considered to be subordinate to water quality standard However, it is required to evaluate effluent standard as an independent regulation and to revise it based on the methods employed in well-developed countries RESULTS AND DISCUSSION Overview of effluent standard in Korea Once a pollutant was included in the effluent standard, the allowable concentration stated remained constant for more than 20 years with the exception of a few cases The main reason is that there was no basis of effluent standard, resulting in just following other countries’ cases In getting the numeric value to control the amount of pollutant discharged, it is difficult to avoid being controversial due to various viewpoints of stakeholders In brief, it can be described as a debate between protection and development; an effort to get clean and safe water and a desire to reach an economically developed society Above all, sustainability can be the conceptual solution to manage it (Costanza et al., 1991), covering both ecological and economic aspects Also, science as - 154 - Journal of Water and Environment Technology, Vol 8, No.3, 2010 an advanced support of policy-making is required to involve the public sector (Cortner, 2000) Pollutants regulated in effluent standard The concept of effluent standard in Korea emerged in the middle of 1960s with the enfo rced ordinance of pollution prevention Although it has been revised continuously, the re sults were just an increase in the number of pollutants and a decrease in the level of allo wable concentration, mostly depending on chemical analyses (Choi et al., 2004) The nu mber of pollutants regulated under effluent standards was initially 7, and now it increase d to 32 (Table 1) It seems that the range of control was greatly increased, yet it is still s mall when compared to the number of pollutants regulated in well-developed countries l ike Japan which regulates 42 pollutants and the U.S which has 65 toxic pollutants to be controlled Because new pollutants in Korea are assessed and selectively included into e ffluent standards by framework for classifying toxic substances in water environment (B ae et al., 2007), it is expected that the number of pollutants would be increased up to the level of well-developed countries The pollutants recently included can be classified int o a group defined as toxic pollutants in U.S (US NARA, 2007) Especially, ecotoxicity which is the same parameter as the whole effluent toxicity (WET ) in Korea has been adopted to unlimitedly manage increasing pollutants with the advan cement of analytical tools The WET regulation checks whether more than 50% of organ isms (fish, daphnia, algae and others) under toxicity test survive or not when they are dir ectly introduced to the discharged wastewater Wastewater is directly applied in protecte d area, while twice diluted wastewater is used in normal areas, as a tool to investigate th e total toxicity on human health and aquatic lives Now it can be easily found that WET, as a complementary tool to chemical approach of the regulation, already took a part of effluent regulation with legal enforcement in other countries (Environment Agency, 2006; Germany, 2004) Nowadays, 32 pollutants (Table 1) officially regulated in Korea can be classified in the f ollowing groups Conventional pollutants Biochemical oxygen demand (BOD), chemical oxygen demand (COD), suspended solids (SS), total nitrogen (TN), and total phosphorus (TP) are classified in the conventional pollutants They are the most representative and common groups in water pollutants Hence, they have been widely used in water quality index, and it is easy to accumulate the effluent data of this group Toxic pollutants Toxic pollutants are the chemicals which can cause fatal threat to human and eco-system even at low concentration They are categorized as priority substances (EU, 2000) or toxic pollutants (Khan and Rubin, 1989) In Korea, 22 pollutants among 32 are included in the toxic group This group is relatively difficult to analyze in general, and is expected to increase in number due to the advancement of analysis It is required to pay attention to select pollutant regulated according to industry Other pollutants The rest of the pollutants are grouped as other pollutants The pollutants under this group contain pH, temperature, color, total coliform and ecotoxicity They are not - 155 - Journal of Water and Environment Technology, Vol 8, No.3, 2010 expressed in mg/L, unlike the other specific chemical compounds As the universal characteristics appeared in almost every industrial effluent to some extent, other pollutants could also be applied to all of the industries except color Color has been reported to appear uniquely high in specific industries such as dyeing and textile industry In this study, this group was not considered to be changed in setting the effluent standards Table - Pollutants regulated under the effluent standards in Korea (Ministry of Government Legislation in Korea, 2009) Areal classification in effluent standard According to the beneficial use of the watershed where wastewater is discharged, the level of allowable amount of pollutant can be set For example, the area where strong protection is required such as drinking water, has normally strict effluent standards specialized for its limited area Moreover, aside from national standards, effluent standards can be applied differently by the local government, making the application more flexible to specific conditions While the protected area was established so far, there has been a little concern on local standard Therefore, once national standard is set, it is applied all over the nation Now, four areas are defined in effluent standard; - 156 - Journal of Water and Environment Technology, Vol 8, No.3, 2010 protected area, normal I, normal II and special area, which is strongly controlled by the central government Though the regulation of indirect dischargers is the same as that of direct dischargers in Korea, there are other countries’ cases (US EPA, 2004; Germany, 2004; EU, 2001) showing that separate effluent standard which was less strict for indirect dischargers could be set in the tolerable level not causing problems to the operation of Publicly Owned Treatment Works (POTWs) Although there has been no problem concerning indirect dischargers in national-level regulation, separate effluent standard has been applied since 1991 The distribution of publicly owned industrial wastewater treatment and sewage treatment systems where separate effluent standards are set is shown in Fig More than 95% of industrial wastewater treatments have their own effluent standard while sewage treatment systems are sensitive to receive industrial effluents so it is not a simple process to confirm its safe operation Therefore, it is also required to induce individual wastewater dischargers to industrial wastewater treatment facilities rather than to the sewage treatment systems Table - Areas in Korea and their water quality standards Area Goal of Water quality BOD Effluent standard (mg/L) COD SS Ia Protected area 30-40 40-50 30-40 (BOD ≤ mg/L) Ib, II 60-80 70-90 60-80 Normal I area (1 mg/L < BOD ≤ mg/L) III, IV, V Normal II area 80-120 90-130 80-120 (3 mg/L < BOD ≤ 10 mg/L) Special area* Secondary effluent standard 30 40 30 *Area around watershed where POTWs discharge has the specific standard (BOD 10 mg/L, COD 40 mg/L, SS 10 mg/L) that has been effective after 2008 (a) (b) (a) (b) Fig - POTWs which have separate effluent standard in Korea (a) Industrial wastewater treatments (b) Sewage treatment systems (Black : with separate effluent standard, Gray : without separate effluent standard) Categorical effluent standard Effluent standards have been transformed from uniform standard to categorical one according to the wastewater characteristics (Tilche and Orhon, 2002) Industrial categorization was once adopted in the middle of 1970s After that, various effluent - 157 - Journal of Water and Environment Technology, Vol 8, No.3, 2010 standards according to the industries were applied but it was soon returned to uniform regulation in 1983 Although 82 industries based on standard industry categorization were officially included in Korean legislation related to effluent standards, categorical application of effluent standards has not been used for nearly 20 years As an intermediate step that seems to be a stepwise improvement (Von Sperling and Chernicharo, 2002), it is desirable to set slightly stricter effluent standards than before, conforming to the existing status The site visit and data acquisition were required to be conducted together continuously to increase the number of effluent data Since there is limitation to get data in the effort of government solely, monitoring and reporting requirements are necessary to be imposed on the industries In part, the role of local governments might be increased in gathering and arranging data from industries located under their authorities Since industrial categorization was not reflected in the effluent standard, industrial categorization in effluent standard is now commonly determined to be feasible in the regulation (EU, 1996; US NARA, 2007) If industrial categorization is included in the effluent standard, the most important factor is whether the categorization is based on the similarity of wastewater characteristics If the categorization simply follows the system of industrial classification, the characteristics can be varied seriously even in same category Therefore, extensive investigation throughout the all the industries should be carried out Improvement of effluent standard in Korea As a way to get the reasonable basis for conventional pollutants which the effluent data have been accumulated for years, effluent standards can be derived from statistical analysis Briefly, the process of setting effluent standard by statistical analysis consisted of four steps (Fig 2); gathering long-term effluent data, transitioning to relationship between concentration and frequency, applying to probability distribution and deriving effluent standards by mean and standard deviation Specifically, variability factor (US EPA, 2002) covering the fluctuation of effluent data in the well-operated plant, is multiplied with the mean of effluent data to get the values of 99 percentile or 95 percentile in the probability distribution The 99 percentile and 95 percentile are maximum daily limitation and average monthly limitation, respectively Since the concept of daily maximum is not included in Korea, it is recommended to adopt the 95 percentile as effluent standard, covering as many effluent data as possible - 158 - Journal of Water and Environment Technology, Vol 8, No.3, 2010 80 60 Frequency 100 Concentration (mg/L) 10 Col vs Col 40 20 0 50 100 150 200 250 300 10 Concentration (mg/L) Time (days) Effluent data analysis Concentration-frequency graph Effluent standard (95 percentile) = μ + 1.645σ (In case of normal distribution, μ: average, σ : standard deviation) Derivation of effluent standard Probability distributional assumption Fig - Setting effluent standard by statistical analysis Fig - Frequency of detection according to COD and total nitrogen concentration in metal assembly industry (Ministry of Environment in Korea, 2007) As shown in Fig 3, the frequency distribution seems to be a kind of lognormal distribution expressed in x=exp(y) After fitting to the x=exp(y), the 95th percentile of x (x.95) can be calculated by the following equations = 2 =  k ln x k (4) n  k (ln x k   )2 n  = mean of sample where,  = standard deviation of sample n = number of sample x 95 = exp(   1.645   ) - 159 - (5) (6) Journal of Water and Environment Technology, Vol 8, No.3, 2010 Based on the method mentioned above, the technology-based standard was found to be more stringent than the existing one, implying that the existing standard was not successful to reflect the actual discharge condition In case of metal assembly industry, TN and TP standards were proposed as the values decreased 17% and 63%, respectively Table - Comparison of conventional pollutant standards in metal assembly industry Pollutant Existing standard Technology-based standard (proposed) BOD (mg/L) 60-120 COD (mg/L) 70-30 SS (mg/L) 60-120 TN (mg/L) 60 TP (mg/L) 40 50 20 50 In numeric values of national effluent standard, toxic pollutants which have water quality standards mostly get effluent standards 10 times higher than water quality standards (Ministry of Environment in Korea, 2001) This is one way of setting the effluent standards from water quality standards, that is, a kind of water quality-based approach Unfortunately, due to the lack of database of effluent quality from individual wastewater dischargers, technology-based approach is hard to be applied for toxic pollutants in Korea What is required to revise the effluent standard framework is to get independent logics in setting the effluent standards, continuing to accumulate as many reliable effluent data from industries as possible As treatability is based on the data accumulated in a long-term, how to set the infrastructure to get the data is a crucial factor in setting the effluent standards The following assumptions can be used in calculating water quality-based effluent standards in water quality-based approach - There is no concentration in upstream - Dilution ratio is the ratio of water quality standard and effluent standard D ilution ratio = W astew ater flow + R eceiving w ater flow W astew ater flow (7) When dilution ratios were calculated among the main streams which receive more than 10,000 m3/year of wastewater, it was found that the dilution ratio, even at a dry season (minimum dilution ratio), was more than 10 (Table 4) Therefore, applying 10 times to water quality standard can be reasonable, assuming simple dilution of wastewater discharged in watershed Effluent standards of several toxic pollutants as shown in Table were set with dilution ratio of 10 - 160 - Journal of Water and Environment Technology, Vol 8, No.3, 2010 Table - Dilution ratio of watershed in Korea River A B C D E F G H I J K Receiving water flow (103 m3/day) Max Min Avg 84,674 15,575 25,133 83,644 7,344 24,262 33,696 6,364 13,586 32,168 1,223 7,115 15,068 950 5,011 14,861 518 3,826 4,389 1,382 2,517 6,877 328 2,088 3,110 173 1,133 4,277 562 2,195 7,279 682 2,603 Wastewater flow (103 m3/day) 255 527 156 22 74 27 26 37 Max 333 159 217 1,463 205 2,478 164 266 347 4,278 198 Dilution ratio Min Avg 62 100 15 47 42 88 57 324 14 69 87 638 52 94 14 81 20 127 563 2,196 19 71 Table - Effluent standards with dilution ratio 10 in Korea As a result, it was found that the effluent standard which has been unreasonably applied could be adjusted to the reasonable level reflecting the actual discharge condition Standard from existing effluent data implies technically available level To set more credibility to the technology-based standard, accumulated data collection is required Because there are usually few observations in a single plant, effluent data from the plants of the same industry were put together Even though the subcategorization was also required according to the presence of toxic pollutants, obtaining a credible statistical result was the priority in this study As shown in Table 6, the proposed effluent limitation becomes more stringent than the existing one based on both technology- and water quality-based approaches - 161 - Journal of Water and Environment Technology, Vol 8, No.3, 2010 Table - Effluent standards of conventional and toxic pollutants in metal assembly industry (unit : mg/L) Methodology Pollutant BOD COD Technology-based SS approach TN TP phenols cyanide compounds chromium dissolved iron zinc copper cadmium and its compounds total mercury organic phosphorus compounds Water quality-based arsenic and its compounds* approach lead and its compounds chromium(VI) dissolved manganese fluorine poly chlorinated biphenyl trichloroethylen tetrachloroethylen* alkyl benzene sulfonate benzene dichloromethane * Pollutants not to be regulated Existing 60-120 70-130 60-120 60 10 0.1 0.005 Proposed 50 60 30 40 0.05 0.1 0.5 0.05 0.005 0.2 0.5 0.5 10 15 0.003 0.3 0.1 0.1 0.2 0.5 0.5 15 0.003 0.3 0.1 0.2 Industrial categorization Plant survey   Visiting survey Questionnaire Pollutants selection Conventional pollutant Toxic pollutant Technology-based approach Water quality based approach Professional judgment, Public hearing Effluent standard Fig - Proposed effluent standard guideline in Korea - 162 - Journal of Water and Environment Technology, Vol 8, No.3, 2010 The proposed effluent standard guideline reflecting the main structure with technology-based and water quality-based approach is shown in Fig At first, industries should be classified into several categories to set the categorical standard After investigating each industry, effluent standards could be established except for the pollutants that are considered not to be discharged Technology-based approach is applied to conventional pollutants whose data can be obtained sufficiently, whereas water quality-based approach is applied to toxic pollutants assuming simple dilution in watershed Then, the proposed standard should undergo professional judgment and public hearing toward social compromise to make the effluent standard a consented degree of regulation CONCLUSIONS It is suggested that the investigation of industrial categorization should be applied to effluent standard, concentrating on the wastewater characteristics Areal classification could be modified into direct and indirect discharge area, without including the drinking water protection area For indirect discharge area, it is desirable to set separate effluent standards to the extent of not interfering POTWs According to the kind of industry, the pollutants under regulation could be selected differently To control the number of pollutants, biological assessment such as WET could be a supplementary in the regulation that has been highly reliable on chemical analyses After gathering sufficient data to conduct statistical analysis, the effluent quality level achievable in the industry could be applied on the basis of treatability Therefore, every industry under the regulation should be responsible for the regular monitoring of the effluent and forwarding the data to the environmental authorities Although only conventional pollutants were assessed by technology-based effluent standard in this study, it is recommended to apply this to toxic pollutants as well Likewise, the approach by water quality-based effluent standard can be applied to conventional pollutants to make sure that the water quality standard is kept In the future, both of technology-based and water quality-based effluent standards should be taken into account to satisfy water quality standard and industrial dischargers Although effluent standards could be enforced by the government, the consensus among stakeholders is considered to be more important in establishing regulations in a democratic society Therefore, public hearing is required in the process of regulation development as well ACKNOWLEDGEMENT The authors appreciate the financial support of the Ministry of Environment of Korea (Project Name : Study on improvement of industrial wastewater management) REFERENCES Abou-Elela S I., Haleem H A., Abou-Taleb E and Ibrahim H S (2007) Application of cleaner production technology in chemical industry: a near zero emission, Journal of Clean Production, 15, 1852-1858 - 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