Groups Challenge EPA’s Hazardous Waste Combustors Rule

Groups Challenge EPA's Hazardous Waste Combustors Rule

EPA's standards for hazardous waste burning facilities are too weak to reduce toxic pollution, leaving nearby communities exposed to health risks

Contacts

Tylar Greene, [email protected]

Several community, health and conservation groups challenged the Trump administration's recently finalized air toxics rule for hazardous waste combustors. The groups' petition for review, filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit on Monday, points to problems with the final rule, including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's failure to set adequate standards required under the Clean Air Act for previously unregulated pollutants.

The rule covers over 160 units that burn hazardous waste, such as incinerators, boilers, and cement kilns, which collectively emit nearly 10,000 tons of hazardous air pollution each year. This includes mercury, heavy metals, and other pollutants that contribute to disease, cancer, and premature death.

"People living near hazardous waste combustors continue to be exposed to toxic air pollution that the Clean Air Act required EPA to curb more than 25 years ago," said Kathleen Riley, senior attorney at Earthjustice. "EPA's weak new standards for hazardous waste burning facilities are not much of a standard at all and just like the old standards, do nothing to reduce harmful air pollution. Without action from the court on hazardous waste combustors, the air won't get cleaner and Americans won't get healthier."

The Clean Air Act requires EPA's hazardous air pollution standards to require at least the emission reductions that the best-performing similar sources have achieved already. In response to challenges by the Sierra Club, the EPA admitted that its prior standards for hazardous waste combustors failed to meet these minimum requirements, and the D.C. Circuit remanded the standards for EPA to fix them. The EPA, however, took no action for more than a decade. The air toxics rule finalized in June of this year, and the subject of the groups' suit on Monday, does not respond to the D.C. Circuit's remand. The agency claims authority to delay in bringing its rule into compliance with the law to a time of its own choosing.

Earthjustice, on behalf of Missouri Coalition for the Environment, Air Alliance Houston, Kentucky Resources Council, Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment, California Communities Against Toxics, and Sierra Club, filed the petition for review. A petition for reconsideration was also filed to comment on new data regarding cement kilns' emissions. On behalf of Sierra Club, a petition was also filed to secure a deadline for EPA to respond to the 2009 order from the D.C. Circuit to address the old standards.

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