EPA Waste Constituent Correction May Ease Emergency Spill Reporting

摘要

EPA is seeking to correct its 12-year omission of reporting thresholds for four categories of hazardous waste that its Superfund rules require liable parties to report in emergency release situations, a fix that is expected to curtail continued overreporting of the wastes' releases in the future, says an environmental consultant familiar with the change. According to the consultant, the agency's correction is expected to limit overreporting of spills because without the concentration thresholds, a transporter or disposal facility handling the wastes would have likely relied on the much stricter reportable quantity (RQ) default value for an individual hazardous substance. The agency's correction also appears to back use of the Clean Water Act mixture rule to calculate what quantities of spilled hazardous substance mixtures have to be reported to regulators, the source says. The agency's endorsement comes after some recent "push-back" by regulators against using the mixture rule, the source says .