Craft beer brewers across the US believe the results of an upcoming Supreme Court case over water pollution in Hawaii could significantly impact their business: the case could have ramifications for the Clean Water Act, undermining its existing protections and making it “trivially easy to evade,” brewers believe. This could lead to more industry pollution of nearby rivers and streams and affect the quality and taste of local water, they say, leading to the necessity – and expense – of installing additional water filtration and testing systems to treat polluted water.

The case, to be argued next month, involves Maui’s Lahaina Wastewater Reclamation Facility and the question of whether or not it requires a federal permit to send wastewater into groundwater sources. The County of Maui asserts that pollution which flows from a specific source into navigable waters does not require permitting under the Clean Water Act as long as it flows through groundwater first.

“Put differently,” the brewers write in a friend-of-the-court brief submitted to the Supreme Court justices, “a factory whose pipe sends pollutants flowing into a river can avoid regulation by moving its pipe twenty feet back and spilling pollutants into a gravel pit, such that groundwater carries precisely the same pollutants into precisely the same river.”

Craft brewers and similar industries rely on clean water for their livelihood, points out the brief. For the 60 brewers that submitted the brief, the installation of costly water treatment equipment could prove cost-prohibitive.

Business groups and attorneys for the Trump administration, on the other hand, say that requiring a federal permit to “pollute groundwater” would extend the reach of US regulators in situations that are much better left to state regulators, writes CNBC.