ABSTRACT
Water quality is important; it can have a major impact on health, both through outbreaks of waterborne disease and by contributing to the background rates of disease. Accordingly, water quality standards are important to protect public health. The water cycle describes how water moves through the environment and identifies the links between groundwater, surface water, and the atmosphere. The effort to regulate drinking water and wastewater effluent has increased since the early 1900s. In 1972, Congress adopted the Clean Water Act, which establishes a framework for achieving its national objective “to restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the nation’s waters.” The physical characteristics of water/wastewater we are interested in are more germane to the discussion at hand; namely, a category of parameters/characteristics that can be used to describe water quality.
