Verify the NPDES compliance history and permit status of a treatment plant before contracting to haul septage there
domain: echo.epa.gov · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
Call the Wastewater/Stormwater/Biosolids Facility Search REST service (facility-search-water) with state and facility name or zip parameters to locate the candidate treatment plant.
Extract the facility name and permit status/significant-noncompliance fields from the JSON response to see if the facility is an active, compliant NPDES permittee.
Pass the returned NPDES permit number into the Detailed Facility Report service for a full compliance and enforcement history.
Check the effluent-charts service for the same permit number to see recent flow/loading data, which indicates whether the plant has spare capacity to accept septage.
Re-query periodically -- ECHO data refreshes on a rolling schedule (documented on the About the Data page), so cache results with a timestamp.
Known gotchas
ECHO's water facility search only covers NPDES-permitted (surface-discharging) facilities; many rural land-application sites or small POTWs below reporting thresholds won't appear.
Field names differ between the search, detailed-facility-report, and effluent-chart services -- read each service's own parameter guide rather than assuming a shared schema.
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