Practical EHS Tips, News & Advice. Updated Daily.
The New Year is customarily a symbol of a clean slate and new beginnings. This year, this notion rings especially true for all Clean Water Act National Pollution Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permitholders. 2016 marks the year the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has eliminated paper-based reporting for all NPDES permittees. In proverbial terms, out […]
In a proposal, the EPA is seeking to revise the public notice provisions for draft Clean Air Act (CAA) New Source Review (NSR) and Title V permits by eliminating the requirement that notice of a draft be published in general circulation newspapers and instituting an electronic public notification system. The proposal would also allow other […]
In a direct final rule, the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy of the Department of Energy (DOE) has promulgated amended energy efficiency standards for small, large, and very large air-cooled commercial package air-conditioning and heating equipment and commercial warm air furnaces.
2016 has the potential to be a very busy reporting year. In addition to the usual annual reports, such as TRI and Tier II, this year also brings the hazardous waste biennial report and TSCA’s chemical data report, which only comes around every 4 years. Reporting deadlines will come up faster than you think. It […]
The Department of Interior’s (DOI) most recent and perhaps most consequential responses to the catastrophic April 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico are proposed regulations for blowout preventer (BOP) systems and well control, which were published in the April 17, 2015, Federal Register.
Following its Clean Air Act (CAA) residual risk and technology review (RTR) of its 1995 National Emissions Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants (NESHAP) covering aerospace manufacturing and rework facilities, the EPA is amending NESHAP by establishing requirements for specialty coating operations, which were not previously subject to NESHAP.
Effective December 9, 2015, the EPA launched a new tool that allows regulated entities to electronically report self-discovered violations. The tool, called eDisclosure, will function under the Agency’s two self-policing incentive policies—the 2000 Incentives for Self-Policing Discovery, Disclosure, Correction and Prevention of Violations and the 2000 Small Business Compliance Policy.
EPA’s 2007 Exceptional Events Rule (EER) was intended to give state and local agencies an avenue to remove data about certain types of monitored air pollution from area attainment/nonattainment designations under the national ambient air quality standards (NAAQS). However, the EER required states to support their applications for data exclusion with analyses that were so […]
The U.S. House welcomed President Obama’s return from the Paris climate change conference by passing a joint resolution to block the EPA from implementing its Clean Power Plan (CPP) to regulate carbon emissions from existing power plants.
By Elizabeth Dickinson, JD The “Hazardous Materials: Harmonization with International Standards (RRR)” final rule was issued on January 8, 2015. Voluntary compliance with the new rule began January 1, 2015, with mandatory compliance delayed until January 1, 2016, unless otherwise specified (as it is for numerous provisions).