Register B

Sewer-use ordinances of large POTWs

Of the six codes we read closely, blood is named in two, and in both it arrives through a clause about obstruction or about pathogens rather than about medical waste.

The finding this register exists to state

In the two codes here that name blood and whose words we hold, the clause it sits in is not a medical-waste clause. The Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts prohibit “whole blood” — the obstruction-list term inherited from the EPA model ordinance — and the City of Los Angeles prohibits discharge “suspected or known to contain bloodborne pathogen(s)”, which is the one transcribed clause on this page that treats blood as a biological hazard in its own right. Boston’s MWRA names neither, and reaches the question only by cross-reference to the Massachusetts health rule, which permits free-draining blood.

Whether that pattern holds across the other five codes is a hypothesis, not a finding, and we are not publishing it as one. Our research pass left an impression that Philadelphia and Detroit reach blood through the obstruction clause and that Hampton Roads and DC Water reach it as a biological hazard. We did not transcribe the operative clause or the section number in any of those four, or in Chicago’s. Under this publication’s own rule an untranscribed impression is not a verdict, so those five ship Not checked with the retrieval fact and the date and nothing else, and the sentence above names only the utilities whose words are printed on this page. Transcribing the five is the first item of the next review, and it is the work that would turn the hypothesis into a finding or kill it.

The Los Angeles County clause is a plumbing rationale, not a pathogen rationale, and that inverts the framing the reader arrives with. The commercial argument for enclosed fluid-waste handling is built almost entirely on exposure to pathogens. The one federal instrument standing behind every code on this page is not worried about pathogens at all; it is worried about grease, grit and clogging: 40 CFR 403.5(b), the national pretreatment standard, does not contain the words blood, medical, infectious or pathological anywhere, and reaches blood only derivatively through obstruction and oxygen demand.12

Six of the eleven codes below were read closely and five were not, so the finding above rests on two utilities. That is a thin base for a general claim about American sewer law, which is why no general claim is made here.

The “whole blood” clause is a slaughterhouse clause

A large number of American city codes prohibit discharging “whole blood.” It reads like a medical-waste rule. It is not one. The phrase descends from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Model Pretreatment Ordinance, where it appears in a list of things that settle, mat and obstruct.11

grease, animal guts or tissues, paunch manure, bones, hair, hides or fleshings, entrails, whole blood, feathers, ashes, cinders, sand, spent lime… spent grains, spent hops…

Retrieval URL not recorded; the full citation is in Sources below.

“Whole blood” sits between entrails and feathers. The neighbours are the interpretation. EPA marks this clause optional — it is not a mandatory national pretreatment standard, and a city that adopts it is adopting a model, not implementing a federal requirement. The same clause was confirmed present in municipal codes in eight states during the research pass behind this register — Washington, Idaho, Ohio, Iowa, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Michigan.

Reading a city’s “whole blood” clause as a hospital rule is a category error, and it is precisely the keyword trap anyone surveying municipal codes will fall into, because the search term matches and the context does not travel with it. We have not seen this written down anywhere else. It does not mean the clause cannot reach a hospital discharge — a prohibition is a prohibition, whatever its ancestry — but it does mean that a reader who finds it and concludes their utility has taken a position on infectious waste has misread the document.

The largest sewer authority in the country says nothing

New York City’s sewer code does not contain the word blood. Neither does King County’s. Both were scanned by machine, both counts were zero, and the terms and the extent of the scan are published in the rows.1, 3 New York’s rules do prohibit the solid carriers of blood — bandages, gauze, cotton balls, swabs, hypodermic needles — while never mentioning the fluid itself. What reaches the sewer lawfully does so through a definition written for households.

bodily wastes, wash water, or similar matter

Retrieval URL not recorded; the full citation is in Sources below.

A silent code is not a permissive code and it is not a prohibitive one. It is a code that has not addressed the question, which means the answer for a New York City generator is settled somewhere else — by New York State’s medical-waste rule, which this publication has not read, and by the facility’s own policy. We are recording an absence, not granting a permission, and the distinction is the whole reason the Silent label exists as a separate status rather than being folded into a yes.

Houston, Miami-Dade and Atlanta are not covered

This register does not cover Houston, Miami-Dade or Atlanta. They were not read. They are uncovered, not silent, and the difference is the entire point of the status vocabulary: a silent row is a scan that came back empty, and an uncovered utility is one we never opened. We make no claim about their codes in either direction, and no absence in the table above should be read as one. Three of the largest metropolitan sewer systems in the United States are missing from an eleven-row table, and any reader drawing a national conclusion from these rows should start there.

How these codes were retrieved, and what that cost

Municipal code publishing is the worst-served corner of primary-source law on the open web, and this register is shaped by that more than by any editorial decision we made.

The commercial host that publishes New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco’s codes returns a Cloudflare 403 to automated retrieval and to curl alike. Those three had to come from Internet Archive raw captures. Where a second official server existed we verified against it — New York City’s own rules server carries the DEP penalty schedule, which served that purpose. Where no second server existed, the row is qualified, because a capture proves what a page said on a date and not what it says today.

The Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts’ current ordinance is behind a 403 with no capture at all, which is the single worst provenance on this page and is flagged as such above.

Five rows are marked not checked because we opened the code and did not transcribe it. That is a discipline decision rather than a research failure. This register does not print a verdict on a clause it cannot show you, and it does not print our recollection of a clause either, which is why those five rows carry the retrieval fact and the date and no characterisation of what the code says. We would rather publish five honest gaps than five confident sentences a reader cannot audit. Closing them is the first item of the next review.

What would change these rows

• The five untranscribed rows — Chicago, HRSD, DC Water, Philadelphia, Detroit — all move as soon as the operative clause and its section number are transcribed. That is the highest-value work available on this page and it is scheduled for the 1 March review.
• Los Angeles County. A reachable copy of the current wastewater ordinance replaces a 1998 text with a live one. If the Districts publish it, or if anyone can send the current PDF, the row is rewritten the same week.
• San Francisco. A repeat scan with the article number and the character count recorded turns the weakest silent row into a reproducible one.
• New York and King County. Any amendment introducing the word blood into either code would flip a silent row, and both are exactly the kind of change that gets made quietly. This is the reason the register has a review date at all.
• The three uncovered cities. Houston, Miami-Dade and Atlanta would each need a full read before they could appear, and adding them is the main argument for expanding this register beyond eleven.

Where this could be wrong

The strongest objection to this register is that six of eleven codes is not enough to say anything general, and we agree, which is why the section above stops at two utilities and calls the rest a hypothesis. The impression we formed of Philadelphia, Detroit, Hampton Roads, DC Water and Chicago is not published as a finding and should not be quoted as one. The correct test of it is not whether it sounds true but whether those five hold up when they are transcribed, and if two of them turn out to be pathogen provisions rather than obstruction provisions the hypothesis is dead and we will say so, with a correction notice.

The second weakness is selection. Eleven utilities were read because eleven utilities were reachable, not because eleven is a representative sample of the publicly owned treatment works in the United States. Large coastal systems are overrepresented and the entire South is represented by one district in Virginia. Nothing here supports a statement beginning “most sewer authorities.” The correct phrasing, which we have tried to hold to throughout, is “in the eleven codes we read.”