Come June 30, 2018, hazardous waste receiving facilities (aka treatment, storage, and disposal facilities (TSDFs) on the federal level) will be paying a fee for each manifest under the new e-Manifest Fee Rule. Hazardous waste generators and transporters should not be deluded into thinking they are getting off scot-free under this program. And, fees are only one way that generators and transporters are affected. Read on!
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Under the 2012 e-Manifest Act, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is required to recover all the costs of developing and operating the e-manifest system. As such, e-manifest will be entirely supported by user fees. Those affected by the new e-Manifest Fee Rule include:
- Hazardous waste generators,
- Hazardous waste transporters,
- Owners or operators of federal Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) TSDFs, and
- Corresponding entities that handle state-only regulated wastes subject to tracking with the RCRA manifest.
Who Will Pay (On Paper, So to Speak!)?
On June 30, TSDFs and other hazardous waste receiving facilities will be required to submit electronic and paper manifests to the EPA and pay a prescribed fee for each manifest. The fee will be dependent on the type of manifest submission—paper, electronic, or a hybrid. A receiving facility will also pay fees for manifests that involve rejected wastes that are being returned by the facility to the generator.
The reasoning behind the fee being ascribed to receiving facilities is purely practical. There are, according to the EPA, 3 to 5 million domestic manifests produced each year for tracking waste shipments within the United States. (Note: The e-manifest system, at this point, does not apply to hazardous waste exports, since the export trade produces only about 23,000 manifests annually.) Since facilities that receive manifested wastes from off-site are few relative to hazardous waste generators, the EPA determined it is more efficient to limit fee collection and payment activities to these receiving facilities.
TSDFs Will Submit Payments, But …
EPA’s decision to levy user fees on the TSDFs and other receiving facilities does not mean that hazardous waste generators and transporters get off scot-free.
Although the receiving facilities will be primarily responsible for payment of user fees to the EPA, they would be able to pass their fee costs through to their generator customers as part of their waste management service charges, if they want. Hazardous waste generators will likely try to share their new costs with the hazardous waste transporters they hire.
What Are the Fees?
The final e-Manifest Fee Rule includes incentives to move from paper to electronic manifests, including:
- Differential fees (paper will cost up to 5 times more than electronic manifest submissions),
- Pivot for higher fees for paper manifest, if electronic manifest use does not reach 75% in 4 years, and
- Phase out of facilities’ mailed paper submissions 3 years after system launch.
EPA’s goal is to eliminate use of paper manifests 5 years after system launch. At that time, the EPA will evaluate the trends in electronic adoption and decide whether to institute a paper ban.
So, for the first year, the EPA estimates that receiving facilities will pay:
- For paper manifests:
- $20 per mailed manifest.
- $13 per image upload.
- $7 per data file upload.
- Electronic manifests are estimated to cost $4 per submission.
What’s Included in the Fee?
In addition to the system setup, operation, and maintenance costs of running such a program, the e-manifest user fees will cover the cost of state and tribal government users’ retrieval of copies and status information on any manifests associated with entities in their state and the general public’s access to e-manifest data.
So, hazardous waste generators and transporters nationwide will likely be looking at increased costs when the e-Manifest Fee Rule goes into effect in June. In tomorrow’s Advisor, we will take a look at this concern and others that hazardous waste generators should consider by June 30, 2018.