Overview

With nutrient loading becoming such a high priority watershed problem, WHM has experience in helping clients manage their problems with nutrient loading. These clients range from municipal waste point source dischargers to agricultural non-point source dischargers of nutrients. WHM provides answers to nutrient management for the clients. Nutrient trading becomes an option when sequestering the nutrients becomes too costly or if the client has sequestered nutrients in excess opening them to the market.

Chesapeake Bay Strategy

Reducing nutrient loads in the watershed is essential for restoring the Bay, which is the largest and most productive estuarine ecosystem in the United States; however, achieving these reductions will not come without a price. Installing control technologies and implementing practices that reduce nutrient pollution require both economic resources and investments.

Nutrient trading has emerged as one promising strategy for meeting nutrient load limits in a more cost-effective way. Under this market-based approach, certain nutrient sources, such as municipal and industrial wastewater discharge facilities, are given more flexibility for how they achieve their individual load limits. In essence, they are given two options: 1) implement pollution control practices on site, or 2) purchase the load reductions from other sources that reduce loads by more than their requirement. In the second option—nutrient credit trading—will likely be chosen if the other source is able to provide and sell the load reduction for a lower cost than the first option and the purchased reduction is certain and verifiable.