The Second Integrated Urban Air Report to Congress—What’s Next?
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With publication of the Second Integrated Urban Air Report to Congress, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has fulfilled its three primary obligations under the 1990 Clean Air Act (CAA) Amendments. These are:
- Report twice on accomplishments realized relative to reducing harmful air toxics;
- Regulate 90 percent of the aggregate area source emissions of each of the 30 urban hazardous air pollutants (HAPs); and
- Regulate sources of not less than 90 percent of the aggregate emissions of each of the seven HAPs cited under Section 112(c)(6) of the CAA.
To date, these actions have resulted in the annual removal of more than 1.5 million tons of air toxics from stationary sources and a 50 percent reduction in mobile source emissions, a number that is expected to continue to decrease as the mobile fleet turns over, resulting in a decrease of about 80 percent by 2030, compared to 1990.
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Going forward, the EPA concedes that there are several data gaps and limitations affecting both their understanding of air toxics and their ability to measure progress. To overcome these, the EPA spells out several steps that should be taken:
- Continuing research on the cumulative impacts of air toxics to better understand and address human exposure to multiple pollutants at once, and other research related to health effects of air toxics (e.g., dose‐response values), exposure assessment, and risk assessment methods;
- Improving emissions inventories. The current program does not require that sources and states submit air toxics emissions data, resulting in significant variations in the consistency and quality of these emissions;
- Promoting ambient monitoring through national programs and community‐scale grants, which will make it easier to identify local air toxics problems and develop strategies that improve public health;
- Working with the Office of Research and Development and other partners to develop new monitoring technologies that are less costly and can provide information that is more transparent and accessible to communities and businesses;
- Updating the 2005 National Air Toxics Assessment (NATA) with more recent data to track progress and trends in air toxics risks; and
- Applying Value of Information principles to ensure the highest value returns from investments in programs and research.
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From a regulatory perspective, the EPA has identified a number of steps that may be taken to achieve additional air toxics reductions through both source-specific and sector‐based strategies:
- Setting risk and technology standards for industrial sources that pose the highest risks with a focus on those emissions that can be controlled cost‐effectively;
- Identifying cost‐effective opportunities for multipollutant reductions across sectors;
- Expanding the integration of pollution prevention and less polluting substitutes into regulatory and nonregulatory efforts;
- Considering environmental justice (EJ) in issuing rules and permitting guidance;
- Establishing additional vehicle and fuel standards to achieve further reductions in emissions from mobile sources;
- Evaluating the impacts of renewable and alternative fuels and determining if additional fuel standards are needed as directed by the Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA) of 2007;
- Focusing efforts on communication and assessment of near‐roadway exposures, including mitigation options for local communities; and
- Developing compliance tools to help industries meet standards and focus enforcement efforts, as necessary, to reduce air toxics in communities.
In the meantime, the EPA plans to continue addressing air toxics as it has since 2004, under its federal enforcement initiative utilizing the NATA and the National Emissions Inventory (NEI). In the past decade alone, EPA’s enforcement of air toxics has resulted in HAP reductions of approximately 10 million pounds and the installation of pollution controls costing an estimated $43 million.