Hazardous Waste

In the United States today, tens of thousands of sites are contaminated with hazardous waste from industrial activities. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that the nation will spend hundreds of billions of dollars to clean up these locations. In the late 1980s, EPA discovered that requirements imposed by the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act may be increasing costs and delaying the progress of some hazardous waste cleanups. Both Congress and the administration have put forth proposals to remedy these impediments. This report discusses (1) the ways, according to EPA, state program managers, and industry representatives, that the act's requirements can affect cleanups and (2) the steps that EPA has taken to address impediments.

GAO noted that: (1) three key requirements under RCRA that govern hazardous waste management--land disposal restrictions, minimum technological requirements, and requirements for permits--can have negative effects when they are applied to waste from cleanups; (2) the requirements have been successful at preventing further contamination from ongoing industrial operations, according to EPA cleanup managers; (3) however, when the requirements are applied to remediation waste, they can pose barriers to cleanups; (4) because much remediation waste does not pose a significant threat to human health and the environment, subjecting it to these three requirements in particular can compel parties to perform cleanups that are more stringent than EPA, the states, industry, or national environmental groups believe are necessary to address the level of risk; (5) consequently, EPA and state program managers and industry representatives maintain, parties often try to avoid triggering the requirements by containing waste in place or by abandoning cleanups entirely; (6) in the late 1980s, when establishing national Superfund guidance, EPA recognized that these three requirements would make some cleanups more difficult and began developing policy and regulatory alternatives to give parties more flexibility in dealing with the requirements; (7) however, these alternatives do not address all of the impediments to cleanups, and some state cleanup managers were not always aware of or did not fully understand the alternatives, while others found them cumbersome to use and inefficient; (8) industry representatives were also concerned that because of the ways that some states are using these alternatives, EPA or a third party may challenge whether the cleanup fully meets RCRA requirements; (9) to allay these concerns, in 1996, EPA proposed a new rule to comprehensively reform remediation waste requirements; (10) the rule included a range of options to exempt some or all remediation waste from hazardous waste management requirements and to give states more waste management authority; (11) EPA had estimated that these options could save up to $2.1 billion a year in cleanup costs; (12) however, EPA recently decided that because stakeholders disagree over whether the agency can exempt remediation waste from the requirements, the agency would face a prolonged legal battle over the new rule; and (13) although areas of disagreement may still need to be addressed, EPA has concluded that the best way to achieve comprehensive reform is to change the underlying cleanup law.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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