Every day, industry and municipal sewage treatment plants dump 1 billion gallons of wastewater tainted with toxic chemicals and oxygen-robbing nutrients into Puget Sound and its tributaries.

And it's all perfectly legal.

The steady stream of wastewater from nearly 1,000 sources - ranging from giant oil refineries to boatyards - is allowed under a federal permitting system created with the passage of the 1972 Clean Water Act. These National Pollution Discharge Elimination System permits, as they are called, are described by many as licenses to pollute.

For 150 years, Puget Sound has been a dumping ground for the commerce and communities that have grown up on its shores. While the wastewater generated by industry and people receives far better treatment today than it did even 20 years ago, it continues as a major contributor to the pollution problems that plague Puget Sound.

"Puget Sound is our front yard and our backyard and it's being poisoned every day," said Billy Frank Jr., a tribal leader and member of the Puget Sound Leadership Council charged with crafting a new Puget Sound cleanup plan by September 2008.

Some cases in point:

• In 2004, large industrial plants such as oil refineries and pulp and paper mills dumped into Puget Sound about 4,300 pounds of chemicals known to harm marine life and build up in the food chain, including such things as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, mercury and lead, according to the 2007-09 Puget Sound Conservation and Recovery Plan. All toxic chemicals dumped into Puget Sound by industry totalled 879,000 pounds in 2001.

• Large industrial plants added 34,000 pounds of highly toxic chemicals to the air in 2004 in the Puget Sound basin. An unknown amount of those toxins ends up in Puget Sound.

• The 65 sewage treatment plants in the Puget Sound basin discharge 600 million gallons of wastewater a day into Puget Sound. While most of it is water, there are trace amounts of heavy metals, toxic chemicals, and medicines and personal care byproducts damaging to fish.

"All of this has to end, if we're serious about cleaning up Puget Sound," said former Secretary of State Ralph Munro, an advocate for the Puget Sound orca, which is one of dozens of Puget Sound species threatened by toxic chemicals that persist in the environment.

Some headway made

In an informal survey of state leaders and The Olympian readers last year, wastewater treatment improvements at sewage treatment plants and the shutdown of numerous polluting industries on the shores of Puget Sound were listed as two of the major successes in Puget Sound cleanup efforts.

"There's less industrial pollution entering South Sound than there used to be," noted Mike Zittel, owner of Zittel's Marina. He offered as examples the 1959 shutdown of the ITT Rayonier pulp mill in Shelton, the closure of the Asarco smelter in Tacoma and the upgrades at the LOTT Alliance wastewater treatment plant in Olympia.

Gov. Chris Gregoire pointed to improvements at wastewater treatment plants and tighter controls over industrial waste discharges to Puget Sound as the top achievements in the past 25 years.

"From the 1970s to the early 1990s, every major wastewater treatment plant in the Puget Sound area upgraded to secondary treatment standards," noted David Peeler, manager of the state Department of Ecology water quality program.

That means more suspended solids, heavy metals and oxygen-robbing organisms are removed from the wastewater than was the case with the cruder primary treatment plants.

But at the same time, millions more people live in the Puget Sound basin than before the plant improvements were made. And 1.4 million more people are headed this way by 2020.

"Population growth is outstripping those great gains we made," Peeler said.

Big polluting industries are less prevalent than they were 50 years ago. And pulp mills, which used to discharge untreated sulfite wastes and other damaging toxins to the marine environment run something equivalent to secondary treatment plants.

For every 1,000 pounds of pulp and paper produced at the Kimberly-Clark mill in Everett, 10 pounds of suspended solids entered Puget Sound in 2006, down from 30 pounds in 1984, according to Ecology records.

But in the case of oil refineries, another major industrial source of pollution in Puget Sound, increased petroleum production since 1984 has contributed to a 33 percent increase in the amount of oil and grease in the wastewater they send to Puget Sound.

"It is expected that contamination to Puget Sound from discharged wastewater may become more severe as population and industrial activity increase," according to the 2000 Puget Sound Water Quality Management Plan.

The last big breakthrough on the industrial toxics reduction front occurred about 10 years ago when the pulp and paper industry changed the way it bleaches paper to reduce dioxins in wastewater by about 95 percent.

Industry officials and regulators alike say there is nothing on the technology horizon that would suggest another pollution breakthrough in the foreseeable future.

"The Environmental Protection Agency has looked at us and said there's nothing technologically out there to improve," said Llewellyn Matthews, executive director of the Northwest Pulp and Paper Association.

"I don't really see anything coming from the feds," agreed Nancy Kmet, who works in Ecology's industrial permits program.

This despite the fact that Congress included a clearly-stated goal in the 1972 Clean Water Act to eventually eliminate toxic waste discharges to the air, land and water from industry:

"It is the national goal that the discharge of pollutants into navigable waters be eliminated by 1985," Congress said 35 years ago.

Legacy of pollution

The failure to remove toxic chemicals from the wastewater entering Puget Sound has created a lasting legacy. For instance:

• Marine sediments in Puget Sound's urban bays contain toxic chemicals at levels 100 times greater than the cleanest rural bays. While pollution entering the water from industry and treatment plants isn't the only source, it's a key contributor, studies have shown.

• The state Department of Health issued an advisory in October 2006, telling the public not to eat more than one serving of Puget Sound chinook salmon a week because of contamination from mercury and PCBs.

• Ecology has identified 23 marine areas and 19 freshwater areas in the Puget Sound region that violate water quality standards for toxic chemicals.

One of those marine areas is Budd Inlet, which is home to sediment tainted by dioxin and other highly toxic chemicals, many of them thought to be associated with leaks, spills and discharges from the old Cascade Pole wood-preserving plant on the Port of Olympia peninsula.

Lower Budd Inlet is one of 10 sediment monitoring sites in Puget Sound that Ecology has been checking for pollutants and abundance of marine life since 1989.

"We see a low diversity of critters at the Budd Inlet station," marine ecologist Maggie Dutch said during a recent sediment sampling trip in Budd Inlet.

She said the trends over time in the urban bays show a reduction in heavy metals, which could be the result of improved wastewater treatment by industry and sewage treatment plants.

At the same time, PAHs are on the rise in sediments, which could be the result of stormwater runoff laden with vehicle exhaust and oils and greases.

Long-term pollution trends identified by Ecology's sediment monitoring team reinforce a growing conclusion: With lawn pesticides and fertilizers, exhaust-belching, oil-leaking vehicles, animal wastes and other contaminants carried to the Sound in stormwater runoff, Puget Sound pollution is everybody's problem.

But that doesn't mean pollution from permitted sources such as sewage treatment plants and oil refineries is no longer important.

"We've made a lot of progress with toxic point-source pollution, but the requirements in the permits have sort of plateaued," said People for Puget Sound lobbyist Bruce Wishart. "There's more that we can do."