Matt Krogh from RE Sources writes in the Bellingham Herald:
It’s simple: We shouldn’t have to fear for our health when we eat fish. The water in which fish live should be clean. The sediments at the bottom of the ocean should be free from toxic contamination and heavy metals. And we should be able to trust that government agencies are appropriately setting critical standards and enforcing the laws that are designed to protect our food supply, our people and our environment.
In Washington, one of those critical standards — the fish-consumption rate — is set by the Department of Ecology. The fish consumption rate estimates how much fish, by weight, each person eats on a daily basis. Ecology uses this standard to determine how much pollution industry can release and how thoroughly cleaned up toxic sites have to be.
The higher the fish consumption rate, the cleaner Puget Sound and other waterways will need to be.