> since 5% of the contaminants are still there

I think you are referring to the statement

> The Purdue researchers were able to recover up to 95 percent of the oil that was absorbed.

This is not referring to the amount of contaminants removed from the water. Its referring to recovering the oil from the activated carbon filter.

Directly it isn't, but because it now meets the EPA standards for clean water from industrial sources it can be discharged into regular water sources where it dilutes and can be drawn from and further filtered by conventional water works, which helps lesson the impact of it's water usage a lot.

This is something I never understood. When everybody is polluting waterways and ground water, it doesn't really get diluted. These companies should be forced to operate responsibly are cease operations. Everyone is for capitalism until we start trying to hold them responsible. If we held them responsible, they'll either adapt or they'll go under and a competitor that is able to operate responsibly will appear.

It can still dilute if everybody is releasing different pollutants; it's only a problem in clusters of similar industry that overwhelms intake filtering.

As to your second argument, the EPA's literal purpose is to force citizens to operate their life/business responsibly; if you think their standards are too lenient than take it up with your elected representative. One of my biggest frustrations I see here are people pushing to overthrowing everything for grand new systems, completely ignore the implementation details for such a system, and then get frustrated when the system fails because of the details. The system to accomplish your goals is already fucking there, use it.

> take it up with your elected representative.

One of my biggest frustrations I see here are people suggesting that you take things up with your representatives as if big corporations don't control the government.

Oh so a corporate subsidy basically

If they were 20x over the limit, then they're now right at the limit.

It doesn't say 5% of contaminants are left, it says 5% of oil. this makes me wonder if there's anything else in this water that should be of concern.