Pollution may go to market

Under ‘cap and trade’ plan, firms could pay for restoration projects to compensate for wastewater

By Lee van der Voo

The Portland Tribune, Sep 18, 2007, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (10 Reader comments)

L.E. BASKOW / TRIBUNE FILE PHOTO

The Environmental Protection Agency is paying for a study of a program for the Willamette River that would allow businesses to curb pollution by buying into habitat restoration. Proponents believe that similar programs could be used to promote good air quality and other environmental goals.

It seemed like a good way to save $150 million.

By paying farmers to plant trees, a wastewater treatment utility in Washington County avoided building a massive refrigeration system, instead using shade to cool water in the Tualatin River.

Now that same utility, Clean Water Services, is aiding a study — paid for by the Environmental Protection Agency — of a “cap-and-trade” program for the Willamette River.

The proposed program, called the Ecosystem Marketplace, aims to allow businesses and public utilities to curb pollution by buying into habitat restoration instead of paying for expensive, sometimes unsuccessful technology.

With public utilities and businesses facing huge costs to curb impacts to the Willamette River from wastewater, the Ecosystem Marketplace proposes to lessen pollution impacts at lower costs with higher returns for habitat and wildlife.

The program would be much like carbon trading on the Chicago Climate Exchange. In that program, companies that emit greenhouse gases can buy credits from those that better control their emissions — in an attempt to reduce greenhouse gases overall in North America.

The Ecosystem Marketplace is being proposed in Oregon by Willamette Partnership, a coalition of conservation, government, business, farm and science leaders now studying the plan through an EPA grant. Portland officials are included in the group.

In the proposed program, limits set for temperature on the Willamette River by the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality would act as a cap.

Businesses and public utilities that release warm wastewater to the river could compensate for the impact to fish by paying for restoration projects on private land that build fish habitat or create water-cooling shade.

While the Ecosystem Marketplace currently targets temperature, if successful it would later aim to address air quality, carbon offsets and habitat restoration. The program depends on private landowners signing on.

As proposed, landowners in the Ecosystem Marketplace could be paid for restoration projects on their land or sell their own completed projects to the marketplace for purchase by a business or utility later.

Conservation groups are cautiously optimistic and are wading in. But questions about how the system will guarantee cooler water — and clean water — still are very much unsettled.

Skeptics of the program wonder how it will tie projects to improve the river to the same communities where pollution impacts are felt. They also question whether it can adequately measure success over time and whether the price to participate in the program will be right for the landowners along the Willamette River — 90 percent of them private.

“It really comes down to finding ways to restore the ecosystems that we depend on. Right now our regulatory systems drive us toward individual projects, in individual areas with individual pipes. … We’re interested in much more than that,” said David Primozich, executive director of Willamette Partnership.

Program acts as example

Willamette Partnership has been probing a concept like the Ecosystem Marketplace, called “water quality trading,” since 2004. In spring 2005, it secured a $779,000 grant from the EPA to begin crafting the program.

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