Audit, Compliance and Risk Blog

The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1969 requires federal agencies to assess the environmental effects of their proposed actions, and incorporate this information into their decisions. Agencies have each adopted their own review regulations, which focus on the search for “significant impacts,” and on alternatives and mitigation measures that will allow an agency to accomplish its goals. This all sounds good, but what does it all mean? For example, which impacts might be “significant?” How many alternatives should be considered, with what attendant costs and benefits?

On May 9, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Chris Pruitt issued a policy memo recasting his agency’s basic approach to review and revision of national ambient air quality standards (NAAQSs) – EPA’s broadest and most basic targets for national pollution levels. He entitles it a “Back-to-Basics” Process for Reviewing [NAAQSs]”, echoing the phrase he used last year to recalibrate the agency’s relationships with the public and its various stakeholders. (I blogged about this general policy here).

Growing up, my mother was instrumental in our family of eight taking camping trips each summer. By the time I was in 4th grade, I had been in 42 states, Canada and Mexico, and had never been on a plane. We explored, hiked, and camped in state parks, national parks, and forests, traversing the country, with a pop-up camper and a paper road map to navigate our journeys.

Many of the items that make their way into your home are designed with only one purpose in mind.  After you’ve opened up a bottle of champagne, the cage and cork become destined for the landfill.  Once you’ve eaten all of the fruit out of the colourful plastic mesh bag, it can’t be recycled and it’s pushed into the trash bin.  You can sit around getting blue about all the waste that abounds or you can do what I do and give those items a second chance at life.

On April 2, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced that it has completed its “midterm evaluation” of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions standards for cars and light trucks for model years 2022-2025, has decided to withdraw standards agreed to between the Obama Administration and California during 2016, and will conduct additional rulemaking to consider less stringent standards. This review began in March 2017, soon after President Trump appointed Scott Pruitt as EPA administrator with a mandate to reduce regulation. California, which has special authority under the federal Clean Air Act (CAA), is leading a coalition of states that has already sued to stop the change. In response to this push-back, President Trump has ordered federal agencies to negotiate with California to seek a compromise.

On April 30, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) published a proposed rule (40 CFR part 30) to “strengthen transparency in regulatory science” by requiring the agency to make the data and models used for significant regulatory decisions available for public and peer review. Like most things regarding EPA these days, the proposal has generated significant controversy – based to a large extent to whether the commenter puts more trust in the proposed system and today’s EPA, or in the existing system and yesterday’s EPA. In the remainder of this blog I’ll discuss what’s nominally involved, and possible adjustments to narrow the opportunities for manipulation by tomorrow’s EPA.

The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) assigns the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to define and then regulate “hazardous wastes.” RCRA provides EPA considerable discretion, and one way the agency applies that discretion is by separating hazardous wastes into a variety of categories that are subject to distinct waste management requirements. One basis for these categorizations is relative risk – the more hazardous the waste the greater the controls required, and the smaller the threshold quantities necessary to trigger regulation. Beginning in 1995, EPA has defined a limited set of lower-risk wastes as “universal wastes” subject to special rules intended to encourage recycling (40 CFR part 273). In March 2018, EPA proposed to add aerosol cans. The rest of this note summarizes universal waste requirements, and how EPA is proposing to apply them to aerosol cans.

A lot of time is spent shopping for the right look and for fashion that will flatter or get attention, but are we spending our dollars wisely to make sure that the clothes we wear today will not damage the environment in other parts of the world or in our own backyards tomorrow?

On February 12, the Trump Administration issued its budget proposal for federal Fiscal Year (FY) 2019 (October 1, 2018 through September 30, 2019), subtitled “An American Budget”. The proposal included a 34% cut in the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) budget, from $8.2 billion in FY 2016 (stable in FY 2017 and FY 2018 under a Continuing Budget Resolutions rather than a fully-new federal budget), to $5.4 billion for FY 2019, with corresponding personnel cuts from 15,408 full-time-equivalent employees (FTE) to 12,250. (these are numbers for EPA in the government-wide budget from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB); the stand-alone budget document on EPA’s website cites $6.1 billion).

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has published its second Annual Plan for Chemical Risk Evaluations. These evaluation workplans are required by the 2016 Lautenberg Act amendments to the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), as an expansion of EPA’s long-criticized efforts to evaluate existing chemicals for potential health and safety hazards. This new Annual Plan updates EPA’s efforts since 2016, and continues to formalize procedures.