Audit, Compliance and Risk Blog

Federal laws (commonly referred to as RCRA, after the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976) provide comprehensive management requirements for parties involved in hazardous waste management, from “cradle to grave” covering generators, transporters, and offsite management facilities. Among these many provisions are requirements that “large quantity generators (LQGs)” submit biennial reports to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) or delegated states in March of every even-numbered year. March 2016 is the next such deadline, so now is a good time to review biennial report requirements.

Who Must File Biennial Reports?

A facility that was an LQG during calendar year 2015 must file a biennial report. LQGs are defined as a facility that generates either of the following during a calendar month:

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Employees in the health care and social service sectors suffer workplace violence at much higher rates than in most other sectors, largely because of the higher risk from their patients and clients. In response to these risks, worker protection agencies and professional organizations have developed guidelines for workplace violence prevention in these sectors. Increasingly, worker protection laws and regulations are being revised to require these activities. Most recently, in December 2015 California has proposed to expand state requirements for security plans to include explicit workplace violence prevention programs.

Existing Requirements For Security Plans

California adopted hospital security plan requirements in 1993. Since 2010, these require state-licensed hospitals to implement security plans, including all of the following actions: Read More

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) requires most employers to prepare and maintain records of occupational injuries and illnesses (I&I Logs) as they occur. OSHA also requires employers to post an annual I&I Summary in each “establishment” within their workplace by February 1, summarizing that workplace’s I&Is during the previous calendar year. Delegated state-run programs impose comparable requirements.

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Laboring under a host of compliance requirements, a weary environmental health and safety professional might be tempted to mutter “Well, what if I don’t?” Of course the answer is that the organization–and maybe the EH&S professional–could face civil and even criminal sanctions from regulators and prosecutors. These sanctions are written into the laws and regulations in order to encourage compliance and punish non-compliance, and they’ve just been revised…but how effective is such encouragement?

Activists and politicians have long argued that potential punishments might be treated as a cost of doing business, and if that cost is low enough compared with the cost of compliance that some organizations may choose to ignore the requirements and take their chances. This possibility grows over time, if nominal penalty levels are left unchanged while inflation effectively reduces them.

To counteract inflationary erosion of these the effects of inflation, for the past quarter century U.S. federal law has directed most agencies to make periodic “cost of living” adjustments to maximum available civil penalty levels (there are no provisions for standing periodic adjustments to criminal penalties). The first version of this approach was enacted by the Federal Civil Penalties Inflation Adjustment Act of 1990, which directed the President to report annually on any adjustments made under existing statutory authority, and to calculate what such adjustments would have been if more agencies had the authority to make them.

How Has The Act Worked Since 1996?

Congress amended the Act in 1996 to authorize and require most agencies to make inflation adjustments every four years. The exceptions precluded cost of living adjustments to penalties under the following:

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Separate Summaries For Generator Categories

In September, EPA published substantial regulatory revisions (which EPA entitles collectively as the Hazardous Waste Generator Improvements Rule) to its regulation of hazardous waste generators under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. In Part 1 of this series of blogs (click here), I summarized the principal revisions. In this Part 2 I recast the proposal to compile changes applicable to different categories of generators: 

• “Conditionally exempt small quantity generators (CESQGs)” – which are being renamed as “very small quantity generator (VSQG)”.

•  Small quantity generators (SQGs).

• Large quantity generators (LQGs).

What Requirements Would Apply To VSQGs?

EPA’s proposes to rename Conditionally Exempt Small Quantity Generators (CESQGs) as Very Small Quantity Generators (VSQGs), and to offer these generators additional flexibility. Eligibility for this category continues to be determine based on the following monthly waste generation volumes: Read More

Summary Of Proposals

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has spent the last decade considering revisions to its hazardous waste management regulations (issued under federal laws generally referred to as the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA)), exploring opportunities to clarify and simplify the text of the regulations and the actions necessary for compliance. In September, EPA published substantial regulatory revisions (which EPA entitles collectively as the Hazardous Waste Generator Improvements Rule) in the Federal Register; comments were due by December 24, after which EPA will decide whether to finalize the changes. EPA calculates that these proposals will include more than 60 changes to specific requirements, and more than 30 additional technical clarifications and corrections. These revisions would clarify some existing provisions, remove some longstanding requirements, and also add some additional new requirements. Some requirements apply to nearly all generators, while others are targeted at one or more of three volume-based tiers.

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Every winter, employee and public health officials around the world prepare for influenza (“flu”) seasons, which vary from mild to the occasional pandemic. Here in the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issue annual forecasts of the strain(s) expected to be dominant, the severity of resulting health impacts, and of the availability and efficacy of vaccinations.

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In 1989 OSHA issued “Safety and Health Program Management Guidelines” (S&H Guidelines), recommending activities employers should undertake to ensure their employees’ safety and health. The S&H Program Guidelines encourage employers to institute and maintain an “effective occupational safety and health program.” Some state occupational safety and health regulators have used these (voluntary) guidelines as the basis for mandatory employer programs – including California’s Injury and Illness Prevention Program (IIPP) requirement and Washington’s Accident Prevention Program (APP) requirement. OSHA proposed a national rule in 2012, but after several delays has designated it a “long term action.”

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The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) adopted massive changes to its Hazard Communication Standard (HCS or Hazcom) effective May 25, 2012, updating chemical information, labeling and training requirements that had been in place since the 1980s. These revised requirements conform U.S. requirements to international guidelines under the U.N.-sponsored Globally Harmonized System of Classification and Labeling of Chemicals (GHS). Recognizing the extent of these changes, OSHA provided multi-year compliance phase-ins for employers whose workers manufacture, distribute or use chemicals (I’ve previously blogged about the changes here, here and here). The next such deadline is December 1, 2015, when distributors must only ship containers that meet the latest labeling requirements – so if you work for an employer that’s an end user of chemicals, all containers entering your facility must meet these requirements rather than the pre-2012 requirements.

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If your organization manages pharmaceuticals, do you know if any of its waste pharmaceuticals are regulated as “hazardous waste” under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA)? And do you know which ones, and why or why not?

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