Resource Conservation & Recovery Act Research Articles

Effects of ammonium molybdophosphate (AMP) on strontium, actinides, and RCRA metals in SRS simulated waste

Three radionuclide-spiked salt solutions have been prepared that simulate a range of typical compositions in Savannah River Site waste solutions. The Savannah River National Laboratory performed a series of tests with the three salt solutions designed to determine the propensity of ammonium molybdophosphate (AMP) to bind some of the common analytes such as the actinides (Pu, Am, Np, U), strontium, or the elements (Ag, As, Ba, Cd, Cr, Hg, Pb, Se) regulated by the Resource Conservation Recovery Act (RCRA). The results of the tests indicate that within the protocol conditions, AMP exhibited no appreciable affinity for plutonium, neptunium, uranium and strontium. AMP showed a possible minor affinity for americium; however, the data is not as clear due to continued americium solubility changes during the duration of the experiment. Of the eight RCRA elements studied, AMP exhibited affinity for only silver under our experimental conditions.

Bureaucratic Discretion and Political Control of the Resource Conservation Recovery Act (RCRA)

Drawing on theories of political control and bureaucratic discretion this research examines two states' experiences with RCRA implementation and administration in the United States. This research finds that both bureaucratic actors and political actors shape the implementation of these environmental programs with money source and regional EPA offices playing a bigger role than expected.

RCRA reform won't happen this year

Attempts to introduce legislation to deal with some of the more vexing problems of the Resource Conservation & Recovery Act (RCRA) in the 105th Congress have essentially run out of time, according to Sen. John H. Chafee (R-R.L). However, Chafee pledges that reforming the nation's cradle-to-grave hazardous waste law will be a priority for the 106th Congress. Chafee, chairman of the Senate Environment & Public Works Committee, had been working with a number of stakeholders to draft a narrow, targeted bill that would get rid of provisions in the current law that impede the cleanup of literally thousands of contaminated sites across the nation. The most recent impetus to reform RCRA came in the form of a 1997 General Accounting Office (GAO) report on the RCRA Corrective Action Program. It said that the cleanup of the nation's 3,700 RCRA-permitted sites was slow and was impeded by unwieldy cleanup requirements and conflict between the states and ...

New England group working on Project XL for labs

The most pressing regulatory concern for many academic research laboratories is compliance with federal hazardous waste regulations, especially those promulgated under the Resource Conservation & Recovery Act (RCRA). To more effectively comply with RCRA regulations, a group of New England colleges and universities is asking the Environmental Protection Agency for a conditional exemption from RCRA requirements to conduct a regulatory reinvention project under the auspices of the agency's Project XL. Project XL is an EPA initiative that derives its XL name from excellence and leadership. Project XL proposals are submitted by regulated entities wanting to conduct real-world tests of innovative strategies that achieve cleaner and cheaper environmental results than the conventional regulatory approaches. Ordinarily, when it approves a project, EPA grants regulatory flexibility in exchange for commitments to achieve better environmental results than would be attained through full compliance with regulations. Th...

Kodak to pay penalties, clean up Rochester site

Eastman Kodak has agreed to pay penalties of $8 million, to correct environmental infractions at a cost of tens of millions of dollars, and to spend $12 million on additional environmental improvements in a settlement with Environmental Protection Agency of alleged violations at Kodak's 104-year-old, 2,200-acre film-manufacturing facility in Rochester, N.Y. EPA cited Rochester-based company for allowing hazardous wastes to leak from its 31 miles of industrial sewers in violation of Resource Conservation & Recovery Act (RCRA). The case serves as a wakeup to aging facilities, says Steven A. Herman, EPA assistant administrator for enforcement and compliance assurance. EPA and Justice Department call settlement a model for the environmental overhaul of America's aging industrial infrastructure. The citations were based on a two-year EPA investigation that began in 1988. EPA and Justice charge that, in addition to leaks, Kodak failed to obtain a permit for a wastewater sludge i...

Municipal Waste Bill Limits Trash Imports from Other States

The Senate has just about eliminated any possibility that the Resource Conservation & Recovery Act (RCRA) will be reauthorized this year. Instead, Senators took care of what they perceived as the immediate problem by passing a separate bill that would allow states to limit imports of wastes from other states. The bill, S. 2877, was introduced June 18 by Sen. Dan Coats (R.-Ind.) and Sen. Max S. Baucus (D.-Mont.), chairman of the Committee on Environment & Public Works' Subcommittee on Environmental Protection. The bill, which would become effective in 1995, would allow written, existing municipal waste contracts executed by local governments to remain in force, in addition to giving local governments and state governors much greater authority to limit future imports of trash. It also calls for General Accounting Office investigations of interstate waste transportation and of the generation of solid waste by the industries springing up on the Mexico-U.S. border. But, in divorcing itself ...

Clean Water Act Is Sailing a Choppy Course to Renewal

■ Rewrite of 1987 bill would shift focus of cleanup from endofpipe controls to entire watershed protection Last year Congressional pundits were betting that renewal of the Clean Water Act of 1987 would sail smoothly through the second half of the 102nd Congress. Today, at the beginning of an election year, they aren't so sanguine. The short legislative session and competing priorities—addressing the problems of a depressed economy and renewing other key environmental laws—are making these crystal-ball gazers hedge their bets. The Clean Water Act is up for renewal now because funding is running out for programs authorized under it. Whether and to what extent it is reauthorized will depend on the content of bills thrown into the legislative hopper and even on when they are offered. Competing for Congressional attention is renewal of another key environmental law, the Resource Conservation & Recovery Act (RCRA). If clean water bills are ...

Environmental cleanup may hurt credit ratings

Meeting future environmental cleanup and compliance costs may have a damaging effect on corporate credit ratings, states a report just issued by Moody's Investors Service. Corporations that handle hazardous chemicals—especially in the chemical, petroleum refining, pulp and paper, plastics, and pharmaceutical industries—are especially vulnerable. That this effect has not yet been felt may only be because the 1980s was a strong decade for most major corporations dealing with chemicals, says Moody assistant vice president Robert D. Buhr, author of the credit analysis. chemical industry is in much better shape financially than, say, the steel industry, he notes. Major environmental laws of biggest concern to the analysts are Superfund, the Resource Conservation & Recovery Act (RCRA), and the 1990 Clean Air amendments. Our feeling is that the total effect of Superfund liability isn't being felt yet, Buhr says. It will be in the 1990s. The industries of concern are somewhat cyclical, he adds, and if ...

Big Risks from Small-Scale Waste

Ask the Environmental Protection Agency to list its hazardous waste priorities and it probably will mention preventing facility contamination, clarifying regulations, and minimizing waste. Ask Seymour I. Schwartz and Wendy B. Pratt what EPA's priority should be and they'll point to small-quantity generators (SQGs), those who generate less than 1000 kg of hazardous waste per month. Their recent book, Waste from Small Quantity Generators: Strategies and Solutions for Business and Government, argues that illegal disposal is rampant among SQGs and—when considering an estimated 1 million sources—adds up to a serious threat to human health and the environment, particularly because much of it occurs in urban areas. Yet, small-quantity generators are hardly mentioned in EPA's July 1990 Resource Conservation & Recovery Act (RCRA) implementation study, The Nation's Hazardous Waste Management Program at the Crossroads. Who's right? Schwartz, who teaches environmental policy analysis at the University...

Chemical Management, Communities Tussle with Hazardous Waste Rules

Like Hercules battling the mythical Hydra, the chemical industry is embroiled in a struggle where each time it manages to cut the head off one problem, two more problems quickly grow in its place. The struggle is with hazardous waste, and, unlike Hercules, the chemical industry has not yet been able to get the serpent under control. The first federal law that specifically regulated the disposal and management of hazardous waste, the 1976 Resource Conservation & Recovery Act (RCRA), set tough requirements for landfills and required companies to track carefully the disposal of their waste. It was soon decided, though, that this was not enough. Old hazardous waste disposal practices had come back to haunt both the communities where abandoned dumps were found and the companies that had left the waste there. This led to the 1980 Superfund law that provided for cleanup of those disposal sites. Extensions to these two laws over the past ...

Major Proposal Completes EPA Rules for Land Disposal of Wastes

The Environmental Protection Agency is finishing up its work on one of the major provisions of the 1984 amendments to the Resource Conservation & Recovery Act (RCRA), which prohibits land disposal of waste that might cause harm to human health or the environment. That provision has resulted in an enormous volume of regulations, specifying treatment standards for more than 450 hazardous wastes, all to be in place by the statutory deadline of May 1990. The final, and most complicated, of these regulations was proposed last month. Called the third rules (because the mandated list of chemicals was roughly divided into thirds for the purpose of writing the regulations), they tackle some of the most difficult hazardous waste streams of the entire law. In addition, the rules set deadlines for treatment of wastes that were previously given extensions for lack of treatment capacity under the first two thirds of the regulations. EPA calculates that the proposal ...

A Computerized Degree of Hazard Assessment for Evaluation of Wastes: An Innovative Aid to Management of Residuals

To determine if a degree of hazard analysis could be implemented, a statistically representative sample of the Resource Conservation Recovery Act (RCRA) Special Wastes and the non-RCRA Special Wastes manifested for disposal in 1984 in Illinois were analyzed. The term “Special Waste” includes all federally-regulated hazardous wastes as well as industrial process wastes and pollution control wastes as defined by the State of Illinois (non-RCRA wastes). A criticism of the present Illinois regulatory system is that all Special Wastes have similar requirements for applications that allow their transport and disposal. The current system does not address the different environmental and health risks posed by these waste streams. A degree of hazard evaluation of Illinois Special Waste streams was an appropriate method to determine the impact of these wastes upon the public health and environment. To conduct a degree of hazard evaluation of Special Waste streams it is necessary to have quantitative data of high quality. The degree of hazard approach permits a distinction among Special Waste streams based on an estimate of hazard based on scientific evidence. For poorly defined mixtures a need for a set of toxicity assessment tests is clear. Such tests would need to be rapid and within reasonable economic costs. Such a hazard evaluation could be conducted in a consistently fair manner with a high degree of accuracy. Although this study was not designed to determine how the degree of hazard analysis could be used in a regulatory sense, it does illustrate procedures that could be employed by regulators. The degree of hazard evaluation has the added benefit of being relatively rapid while reducing subjectivity in the decision-making process. Finally, the evaluation can be economically positive in that those industrial waste streams that demand more costly disposal techniques may be identified and separated from those waste streams that pose little hazard to human health and the environment.

Waste Treatment Regulation To Exact Heavy Penalty on Industry

When Congress passed the 1984 amendments to the Resource Conservation & Recovery Act (RCRA), one thing it wanted to do was prevent future landfill problems. It did this by specifying that many industrial wastes would have to be treated to make them safe before they were discarded. The Environmental Protection Agency is in the process of issuing regulations to ensure industry compliance with that directive. Last week, EPA proposed what will be the most expensive hazardous waste treatment regulation under the RCRA amendments. This rule will affect 24 types of industrial waste streams, to be increased to 41 waste streams by an additional proposal in about one month. The rule requires that all the wastes be treated and stipulates exactly what the treatments will be. Companies have no choice in the matter. EPA estimates that the annual cost to comply with this rule will be between $650 million and $700 million. Sylvia K. Lowrance, director ...

Hazardous waste generation hard to quantify

In the past decade, hazardous waste, how it is generated and how it is disposed of, has become one of the most emotional environmental issues to grip the U.S. Two laws—the Resource Conservation & Recovery Act (RCRA) and the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation & Liability Act, more commonly called Superfund—have been enacted to deal strictly with such wastes. The results of these laws have been controversial. One difficult problem is just keeping track of the waste. Quantification has been nearly impossible, and different definitions and calculation methods used by various groups have led to widely disparate numbers. Two new reports on the chemical industry's handling of hazardous wastes have just been issued that demonstrate this problem. The Chemical Manufacturers Association has been conducting hazardous waste surveys of its members since 1981, collecting information from hundreds of chemical plants on their waste practices. The continuity of the surveys has allowed CMA to observe trends ...

Chemical waste disposal a costly problem

In 1976 the U.S. chemical industry appeared preoccupied with the then newly passed Toxic Substances Control Act which promised for the first time to regulate the chemical business in a very basic way. Although another piece of less-noticed legislation, the Resource Conservation & Recovery Act (RCRA), had been passed at nearly the same time, it took two years for its impact to be fully appreciated. By some analyses, the effect of RCRA on the chemical industry appears to be nearly as great, as TSCA's, and certainly more immediate. Unlike the toxics law, RCRA doesn't try to tell chemical makers what they can make. It tells them what they will have to do with chemicals they no longer want. The need for proper disposal of hazardous chemical wastes cannot be disputed. Newspaper headlines almost daily remind the public of long-forgotten chemical waste dumps that have come back to haunt communities such as Love Canal near Buffalo, ...