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Last modified: March 22, 2019Comments
in Opposition to Proposed Rule
Deregulating Municipal Solid Waste Landfills
by
Grassroots Recycling Network, Natural Resources
Defense Council and Friends of the Earth
Submitted
August 9, 2002 to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Docket F-2002-RDMP-FFFFF
State Research, Development and Demonstration Permits for MSW Landfills
EXECUTIVE
SUMMARY
In 1984 Congress
enacted the Hazardous and Solid Waste Amendments (HSWA) to the Resource
Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976 (RCRA), the core statute establishing
a regulatory system for landfills. Among other things, those amendments
required the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to promulgate
national minimum standards for the siting, design, operation and
closure of municipal solid waste (MSW) landfills. The national standards
were to insure that “there is no reasonable probability of
adverse effects on health or the environment” from a polluting
landfills.
In 1991, EPA
promulgated the first national standards for municipal landfills,
which were, in general, implemented by a program under EPA supervision
of State permitting consistent with those federal criteria. These
are what many refer to as the Subtitle D regs (named after the section
of HSWA where the MSW requirements are found). This federal/state
partnership paralleled the enforcement system used for protecting
the air and surface waters from pollution that had been enacted
over the years since 1970, namely an overarching structure of national
minimums accompanied by federally supervised permitting and enforcement
by the States within those national boundaries and under federal
supervision.
This summer,
EPA proposed to radically alter that structure for landfills. It
is proposing to create a new rule that would permit most States
to waive compliance with most design, operation and cover standards
for municipal landfills.
EPA claims
that the purpose of the proposed rule is to encourage innovation.
However, GRRN believes that this claim is a thinly disguised and
illegal ruse to deregulate landfill permitting, based upon the following:
- There is no oversight of the many waivers that the States are
authorized to grant and whether there really is anything “innovative”
about a permit application or whether the innovation’s gains
offset the waivers to provide equivalent environmental protection.
- There is no definition of the word “innovation”
that, as a practical matter, in any limits the possibilities of
waivers to virtually any applicant. Moreover, there is already
in the U.S.Code a provision that already permits variances from
the national minimums that provides equivalent protection. But
that section is administered by the EPA to insure federal consistency:
it does not delegate that power to the States, as the proposed
rule does.
- There is no specificity about how environmental equivalence
between the “innovation” and the existing rules is
to be established. Coupled with the absence of federal supervision
and the ersatz requirement becomes effectively meaningless.
- The waivers can be granted for up to 12 years, which is long
enough for most landfill cells to complete their lives, and far
longer than needed for most tests. Another existing variance program
to encourage innovation for hazardous waste landfills is limited
to just 4 years.
True experimentation
intended to provide data that may be used to revise the present
national landfill criteria cannot be done without a consistently
applied set of questions to be answered and uniform protocols for
answering them, including controls, statistical sampling and reliable
field measurements, as laid out in the scientific method. The existing
rule that permits EPA consideration of innovative alternatives could
well be the vehicle for valid scientific investigation of those
alternatives. But, dispersing the locus of investigation among 49
different States and territories would only dissipate any ability
to collect comparable valid scientific data upon which rational
decisions might be made. Indeed, if there is a bona fide interest
in spurring innovative research that can be used to improve the
development of a new set of landfill criteria, the proposed rule
would be the very antithesis of how a responsible agency would proceed
to process applications seeking waivers for testing of innovative
approaches.
Read
the full comments [pdf]
from GRRN, NRDC and FOE
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