Practical EHS Tips, News & Advice. Updated Daily.
Employer Trip Reduction (ETR) Under the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments, states that have areas designated as extreme or severe nonattainment for ozone were required to revise their state implementation plan (SIP) by adopting regulations to implement ETR programs and reduce work-related vehicle trips and miles traveled by employees. In 1995, Congress amended the law, […]
Compliance with refrigerant handling and appliance and equipment repair requires a lot of paperwork and recordkeeping. Exclude Purged Refrigerants Tip 8: If you own refrigeration equipment and want to exclude purged refrigerants that are destroyed from annual leak rate calculations, keep these records: Records sufficient to support the amount of refrigerant you claimed you sent […]
EPA’s regulations for safeguarding and repairing the stratospheric ozone layer include provisions for the servicing and disposal of refrigeration and air-conditioning equipment. Under these regulations, a “refrigerant” is defined as any substance consisting of, or is part of, a Class I or Class II ODS that is used for heat transfer purposes and provides a […]
Note: The current health-based ozone standard is 75 parts per billion (ppb). The groups discussed in this article all recommend that the EPA retain the current ozone standard. National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) NAM commissioned a study concerning the costs of EPA’s proposed ozone standards. The initial (July 2014) and updated (February 2015) study was […]
By law, the EPA cannot consider costs when setting a health-based National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS). Nonetheless, to inform stakeholders, the Agency typically calculates the costs of meeting the NAAQS as well as the monetary benefits. Note: The current health-based ozone standard is 75 ppb. The EPA estimates costs at $3.9 billion in 2025 […]
Owners of equipment with charges of more than 50 pounds (lb) of refrigerant are required to repair leaks in the equipment when the leak rates exceed a certain percentage of the charge over a 12-month period. For commercial and industrial process refrigeration, the leak rate requiring repair is 35 percent or more of the charge […]
5 Additional Best Practices for LDAR Programs These best management practices for LDAR programs follow up on the 7 we discussed yesterday. Maintain a “Delay of Repair” list. Any component that cannot be repaired during the specified repair interval must be placed on a “Delay of Repair” list to be repaired during the next shutdown […]
The Agency has estimated that approximately 70,367 tons per year of VOCs and 9,357 tons per year of HAPs have been emitted from equipment leaks. Many federal regulations under New Source Performance Standards (NSPS) at 40 CFR 60 and National Emissions Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants (NESHAPs) at 40 CFR 61 and 40 CFR 63 […]
EPA Targets Oil and Gas Industry Methane Emissions Methane is a potent GHG that represents a global warming potential that is more than 25 times greater than that of carbon dioxide. It is also the primary constituent of natural gas, and according to the EPA, almost 30 percent of U.S. methane emissions originate in the […]
10 Things to Know About the GHG Reporting Program—Part 2 6) Facility owners and operators, not the EPA, are responsible for determining the facility’s “Designated Representative.” According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), when facilities covered by the GHG Reporting rule have more than one person sharing responsibility for reporting, “the greenhouse gas reporting rule […]