ALDF Partners with Advocates to Challenge EPA for Discarding Slaughterhouse Water Pollution Rules

On September 15, 2025, the Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF) joined a coalition of 10 organizations to file a federal lawsuit challenging the Trump Administration’s recent decision to abandon the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations that would have stopped millions of pounds of pollutants from being dumped by slaughterhouses and meat processing plants into waterways across the U.S.

The groups filed their petition with the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit after the EPA on August 28 announced that it would throw out rules planned by the Biden Administration that would have, for the first time, imposed limits on phosphorus pollution from 126 meat industry plants across the U.S., eliminating at least eight million pounds of this pollutant per year, plus nine million pounds of nitrogen and other pollutants, including fecal bacteria and grease.

ALDF partnered with a similar coalition of groups in a lawsuit against the EPA in 2019 demanding that the agency follow the requirements of the Clean Water Act and modernize badly outdated technology standards for water pollution control systems for slaughterhouses and meat processing plants, which for some facilities had not been updated in two decades and for others never established.

Following that lawsuit, EPA announced in September 2021 that it would update standards for the industry, and another lawsuit resulted in a consent decree requiring EPA to take final action on the standards by August 31, 2025.

On January 23, 2024, the Biden Administration EPA proposed to revise the existing technology-based effluent limitations guidelines and standards for the meat processing industry. However, just before the deadline of August 31, 2025, the EPA announced that it had decided not to implement any of the three options it proposed for updating pollution control standards from the industry.

Although EPA attributed its decision to abandon the rules to the fact that the meat processing industry faces “multiple economic stressors,” the agency’s own records shows that – even under the most stringent of the three proposed standards — fewer than 1 percent of all the meat processing facilities would face economic stress by upgrading their pollution control systems.

The petition to force EPA to address the problem of slaughterhouse water pollution was filed yesterday by the Environmental Integrity Project (EIP) and Earthjustice on behalf of Cape Fear River Watch, Rural Empowerment Association for Community Help, Waterkeeper Alliance, Humane World Alliance, Food & Water Watch, Environment America, Center for Biological Diversity, and Animal Legal Defense Fund.