Practical EHS Tips, News & Advice. Updated Daily.
The EPA possesses substantial flexibility in how it considers the costs and benefits of regulations it promulgates. That flexibility is inherent in the environmental statutes, which sometimes require that costs be considered in rulemaking and sometimes make no mention of costs/benefits, but, in any case, rarely specify how such consideration should occur. This has given […]
In 1971, the EPA and the Department of Transportation (DOT) issued a joint memorandum to clarify jurisdictional issues related to the regulation of facilities with the potential to discharge oil into the environment. Nearly 50 years later, there is still significant uncertainty about where one agency’s authority ends and the other’s begins.
Memorial Day has passed, and the beginning of summer is upon us. In the world of environmental compliance, this means that Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) reports are on the top of the “to-do” list. TRI reports are due July 1. Watch now on-demand! TRI reports, as mandated under Section 313 of the Emergency Planning and Community Right to […]
The AGs from eight states plus the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection have together filed suit against the EPA for its alleged failure to implement the Obama administration’s 2016 municipal landfill emissions guidelines (August 29, 2016, Federal Register (FR)) according to the timeline mandated by the Clean Air Act (CAA).
In a proposal, the EPA indicated that it intends to deny five petitions from the states of Delaware and Maryland, which asked the Agency to find that emissions from power plants in upwind states are significantly contributing to exceedances of the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) for ozone in the two petitioning states.
At the 2018 Connecticut Business & Industry Association (CBIA) Energy & Environment Conference, Kristen Sherman, Assistant General Counsel for UTC Aerospace Systems, discussed steps concerning outreach that businesses can take to prevent lawsuits. Though the topic of the discussion was vapor intrusion, the migration of vapor-forming chemicals from a subsurface source into soil and groundwater, […]
EPA’s use of its Hazard Ranking System (HRS) to place a contaminated area in Indianapolis, Indiana, on the Superfund National Priorities List (NPL) was successfully challenged in court by one of the companies the Agency claimed was responsible for the contamination.
A two-pronged effort—one by the EPA and one by Congress—is under way to reform the Clean Air Act’s (CAA) New Source Review (NSR) program. In December 2017 and March 2018, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt issued two memorandums for Agency regional offices, which somewhat loosened the criteria for determining if NSR is required. Now, House Republicans […]
At the Connecticut Business and Industry Association’s (CBIA) 2018 Energy and Environment Conference, a panel of industry experts recommended several best practices and business strategies that companies should consider as part of their spill response preparation process beyond the mandatory Spill Prevention, Control, and Countermeasure (SPCC) requirements.
Following a residual risk and technology review of its 2003 National Emissions Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants (NESHAP) for facilities engaged in surface coating of wood building products, the EPA is proposing not to revise the existing emissions limits.