Court Confirms EPA’s Emission Reporting Exemption for Poultry and Egg Producers

The United States District Court for the District of Columbia yesterday issued an order that confirmed a reporting exemption for air emissions from the natural breakdown of animal waste at a farm. The court affirmed that the reporting exemption under the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (EPCRA), issued by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in June 2019, is appropriate because of the relationship between the reporting mandates under EPCRA and the Comprehensive Emergency Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA), also known as the federal Superfund law.

This decision comes more than 20 years after USPOULTRY, NCC and the National Turkey Federation formally requested that EPA exempt poultry farms from the requirement to report the emission of ammonia under CERCLA and EPCRA. The request emphasized the principle that the CERCLA and EPCRA programs were never meant to cover the release of naturally occurring substances into the air that originates from the breakdown of animal waste. This was affirmed by Congress by the passage of the Farm Act in 2018, which expressly exempted farms from reporting the emission of substances from animal waste into the air under the CERCLA statute.

This ruling comes after a coalition of environmental groups filed a motion for summary judgment challenging the exemption. USPOULTRY, National Cattlemen's Beef Association, National Pork Producers Council and the American Farm Bureau intervened in the lawsuit on EPA's behalf.