Abstract
Introduction of Technology-Based Effluent Limitations (TBELs) concepts into Korea requires extensive and through analyses on the expected pollutants reduction effects and the cost factor for the industry side. In addition, the TEBLs should be optimized for the regulatory environments of Korea and be applied in a progressive manner to minimize the undesirable effects. It is also necessary to assess the contribution of each industrial categories's to the pollution of natural water bodies to find the priority of TEBLs application. For these purposes, the pollution loads of various industrial categories were analyzed using risk assessment indicator based on Toxic Weighting Factors (TWFs). First, the TWFs were calculated for the pollutants regulated using the method adopted by USEPA. And the effluent characteristics of the eighty two categories of industry in Korea were investigated. Although the analytical data on the wastewater from different industrial categories are relatively limited, the results from two previous studies were used. The first study, conducted by the National Institute of Environmental Research in 2001~2004, investigated the wastewater characteristics from 255 industrial sources covering the major 20 industrial categories. The second study includes more recent analytical data for the wastewater from 500 industrial sources, covering all the 82 industrial categories. In the result of the pollution loads analyses, the category of 'Synthetic and Chemical manufacture' was found to show the highest raw pollution load. On the other hand the category of 'Ion & Steel manufacture' was found to show the highest effluent pollution loads, which can be considered as the real impacts on natural water streams. The top five categories occupied 62.2% of the total effluent pollution loads. Through the analyses, the relative importances of each industrial categories and the priorities of TEBL-based pollution reduction were determined.