Industrial surface impoundments: environmental settings, release and exposure potential and risk characterization.

This paper presents the results of a national scale evaluation of the environmental impact of surface impoundments that contain non-hazardous wastewaters. In the 1990s, it was found that approximately 18,000 surface impoundments existed in the US for treating, storing or disposing of non-hazardous wastewater. In this study, the focus was on the subset of 11,900 impoundments that contain at least one of 256 chemicals of interest or high or low pH wastewater.