Section 281.01. Definitions.

  In this chapter, unless the context requires otherwise:

(3)  “Department" means the department of natural resources.

(4)  “Garbage" means discarded materials resulting from the handling, processing, storage and consumption of food.

(5)  “Industrial wastes" includes liquid or other wastes resulting from any process of industry, manufacture, trade or business or the development of any natural resource.

(6)  “Municipality" means any city, town, village, county, county utility district, town sanitary district, public inland lake protection and rehabilitation district or metropolitan sewage district.

(7)  “Other wastes" includes all other substances, except industrial wastes and sewage, which pollute any of the surface waters of the state. The term also includes unnecessary siltation resulting from operations such as the washing of vegetables or raw food products, gravel washing, stripping of lands for development of subdivisions, highways, quarries and gravel pits, mine drainage, cleaning of vehicles or barges or gross neglect of land erosion.

(8)  “Owner" means the state, county, town, town sanitary district, city, village, metropolitan sewerage district, corporation, firm, company, institution or individual owning or operating any water supply, sewerage or water system or sewage and refuse disposal plant.

(9)  “Person" means an individual, owner, operator, corporation, limited liability company, partnership, association, municipality, interstate agency, state agency or federal agency.

(10)  “Pollution" includes contaminating or rendering unclean or impure the waters of the state, or making the same injurious to public health, harmful for commercial or recreational use, or deleterious to fish, bird, animal or plant life.

(11)  “Refuse" means all matters produced from industrial or community life, subject to decomposition, not defined as sewage.

(12)  “Secretary" means the secretary of natural resources.

(13)  “Sewage" means the water-carried wastes created in and to be conducted away from residences, industrial establishments, and public buildings as defined in s. 101.01 (12) , with such surface water or groundwater as may be present.

(14)  “Sewerage system" means all structures, conduits and pipe lines by which sewage is collected and disposed of, except plumbing inside and in connection with buildings served, and service pipes from building to street main.

(15)  “Solid waste" means any garbage, refuse, sludge from a waste treatment plant, water supply treatment plant or air pollution control facility and other discarded or salvageable materials, including solid, liquid, semisolid, or contained gaseous materials resulting from industrial, commercial, mining and agricultural operations, and from community activities, but does not include solids or dissolved material in domestic sewage, or solid or dissolved materials in irrigation return flows or industrial discharges which are point sources subject to permits under ch. 283 , or source material, as defined in s. 254.31 (10) , special nuclear material, as defined in s. 254.31 (11) , or by-product material, as defined in s. 254.31 (1) .

(16)  “System or plant" includes water and sewerage systems and sewage and refuse disposal plants.

(17)  “Wastewater" means all sewage.

(18)  “Waters of the state" includes those portions of Lake Michigan and Lake Superior within the boundaries of this state, and all lakes, bays, rivers, streams, springs, ponds, wells, impounding reservoirs, marshes, watercourses, drainage systems and other surface water or groundwater, natural or artificial, public or private, within this state or its jurisdiction.

(19)  “Water supply" means the sources and their surroundings from which water is supplied for drinking or domestic purposes.

(20)  “Waterworks" or “water system" means all structures, conduits and appurtenances by means of which water is delivered to consumers except piping and fixtures inside buildings served, and service pipes from building to street main.

(21)  “Wetland" has the meaning given in s. 23.32 (1) .

1995 a. 227 ; 1999 a. 9 ; 2001 a. 6 .