New Plan Floated To Absorb Long-Term Waste Liability Without Hill Action

摘要

A pair of environmental consulting firms are floating a new plan to address thousands of mothballed brownfields sites by requiring EPA to provide qualified releases for certain long-term cleanup liabilities under its existing authority, a different approach than an earlier proposal that failed, in part, because Democrats balked at providing new liability relief for industry.rnBut the new proposal is winning only a luke-warm reception from some industry sources, who say it could end up costing them more than their current expenses at contaminated sites and that, without legislation, the approach would not provide the long-term liability relief that some companies need to bring the properties into productive reuse.rn"The only way to turn over some of these [mothballed] sites [is] to end liability for some PRPs, which can only happen via a statute change," one industry source says.