This story is from the Chronicle of Higher Education. - Ralph From the issue dated December 17, 2004 Colleges May Get a Break on Hazardous-Waste Rules Proposed change by EPA follows crackdown and years of lobbying by institutions Map: Showing waste-management penalties at colleges By KELLY FIELD In 1997 inspectors from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency visited the University of Hawaii and found thousands of containers of hazardous chemicals stashed in an old fallout shelter beneath the Manoa campus's main chemistry building. The agency fined the university for violating the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, the federal law governing hazardous-waste management on college campuses. After negotiations, the university agreed to pay $1.7-million, the largest federal hazardous-waste fine ever paid by a college. Since then, the EPA has inspected scores of laboratories, art studios, and photography labs at more than 300 small and large colleges and issued $8-million in penalties and environmental projects through its College and University Initiative, a campus-by-campus crackdown that started in the Northeast in 1999 and has gradually spread throughout the country. EPA officials say that the enforcement effort, while at times uneven, is necessary to bring delinquent campuses into compliance with federal environmental laws. But college leaders say the majority of the violations at universities are administrative, not substantive, and typically cause little or no actual environmental harm. They blame the industry-oriented resource-conservation law for their failures, and have lobbied vigorously for years for regulatory relief from the law. They may soon get it. A rule change the EPA is scheduled to issue in the next several months would shift the burden for identifying hazardous waste from professors and graduate students to environmental-health-and-safety personnel, allowing colleges to make hazardous-waste determinations in central accumulation areas rather than in laboratories. It would also allow college laboratories to store hazardous materials for longer periods of time and treat some waste on-site without a permit, reducing the amount that must be shipped off-site. Supporters say the changes could help standardize practices across campuses, making it easier to comply with federal standards when researchers move between colleges in different regions. "We're 180 degrees from an industrial operation, which the regulations were written to address," said Roy Y. Takekawa, the environmental-health-and-safety director at the University of Hawaii-Manoa. "If we can get some changes, it might make it easier in the future." The Crackdown The EPA's College and University Initiative began in the Northeast's Region 1 after inspectors picked up on a pattern of violations during visits to Boston University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of New Hampshire, and Yale University. The inspectors proposed an approach that would combine enforcement with compliance assistance, and their bosses agreed. Four other EPA regions quickly followed suit. In 2000 the EPA devoted an issue of its Enforcement Alert newsletter to colleges and universities. The front-page headline warned: "EPA holding educational institutions to same standards as industry." But the EPA headquarters in Washington never coordinated the crackdown for its field offices, and some regions have been much more aggressive than others. The most punitive have been those with a high concentration of college campuses, including the coastal regions covering New England, New York, and New Jersey, the mid-Atlantic and the Pacific Southwest; the least have been Regions 8 and 10, which cover the Western States. Colleges in "some regions will say, 'Oh, we have no trouble,'" says Anne Gross, vice president for regulatory affairs for the National Association of College and University Business Officers. But institutions in other areas "will say, 'That's not what they say in my region.'" Agency inspectors say the most common violations involve failure to label containers properly; failure to inspect hazardous-waste containers weekly; failure to train laboratory workers; failure to minimize risk of fire or explosion; and improper disposal of hazardous materials. The inspectors say most violations occur because colleges do not devote sufficient resources to their environmental-health-and-safety departments. At some smaller colleges, they say, hazardous-waste disposal is handled by the sanitation and janitorial departments, or by campus police. Larger colleges, meanwhile, may fail to designate one person to oversee their multiple environmental-health-and-safety departments. Russ Schaff, the facility health-and-safety coordinator at Washington State University, says that when his university was inspected in 1992, hazardous waste was handled by himself, a radiation-safety employee, and a fire chief who doubled as a police officer. The university later hired four employees to handle hazardous waste. Other colleges conclude that the risk of being inspected is low and "roll the dice," says Peggy Bagnoli, the EPA's liaison to academe. "There are only so many EPA people out there, and they can't inspect everyone, so they say, 'I'll take my chances.'" In some cases, violations occur when professors do not take waste management seriously, says Kenneth B. Rota, the chief enforcement officer in Region 1. "Professors don't like to be told what to do in their labs. It's their kingdom," Mr. Rota says. When inspectors do find a violation, they calculate a fine that is often negotiated down by colleges. One way they do that is by proposing a so-called Supplemental Environmental Project, like the Environmental Virtual Campus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is a Web site that lets college employees and others navigate a virtual laboratory, a medical area, an art studio, and a waste-storage facility to identify the federal regulatory requirements. Typically, the EPA will reduce the monetary fine by $1 for each dollar invested in an environmental project. In rarer cases, colleges may challenge the penalty in court. Few colleges choose this route, though, because the legal fees are often higher than the penalties, says Barry M. Hartman, an attorney who often represents the American Council on Education. But Mr. Hartman says that by not contesting the penalties, colleges may have made themselves "easy targets" for the agency. "If you put a policeman in the back of your car, sooner or later he is going to give you a ticket," he says. Rethinking the Law Enacted in 1976, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act has always been an awkward fit for academe, which produces less than 1 percent of the nation's hazardous waste. Written with industry in mind, the law was tailored to large-scale producers of select types of hazardous waste, like petroleum and metals manufacturers. The result, critics say, was a "fundamental mismatch" between the law and college campuses, which produce smaller quantities, but larger varieties, of hazardous waste. While industrial plants are typically centralized, college campuses tend to consist of many individual labs, art and photography studios, and hospitals run by individual professors and students. At some larger universities, each college has its own environmental-health-and-safety department, with its own budget. This decentralized structure, coupled with high student turnover, makes it difficult for colleges to put in place uniform waste-management practices, critics of the law say. The proposed rule change from the EPA would move the hazardous-waste determination out of the laboratory and into a central waste-accumulation area. "It would take the burden off laboratory personnel," says Bruce D. Backus, assistant vice chancellor for environmental health and safety at Washington University in St. Louis and chairman of a committee that is working with the EPA on the rule change. "You would have better quality control." Under the proposal, students and professors would simply label used chemicals "laboratory waste," and leave it to the environmental-health-and-safety personnel to code the waste as "hazardous," and dispose of it according to federal requirements. Mr. Backus said the shift could also lead to greater waste recycling, since environmental-health-and-safety personnel are often know the chemical needs of other laboratories. The new regulations would also give universities the authority to treat wastes on campus without obtaining a permit and give laboratories 30 days, rather than the current three, to remove hazardous waste once the 55-gallon limit has been met. Many colleges have complained that it is difficult to predict when accumulation limits will be reached and arrange for a pickup within three days. Test Campuses Some of the rule changes are being tested on three New England campuses chosen for their clean environmental records: the University of Vermont, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Boston College. At Boston College, evidence of the test can be seen in the bright-yellow labels affixed to the bottles for collecting acetone, methylene chloride, and other hazardous wastes from the chemistry department's experiments. Instead of "hazardous waste" at the top, the label reads "laboratory waste." Although seemingly superficial, this semantic shift signifies a major change in laboratory protocol, says Gail Hall, the college's environmental-health-and-safety officer. It means that professors and students are no longer responsible for determining whether the waste is hazardous, a task that now falls to Ms. Hall. Ms. Hall says the change has taken some of the administrative burden off professors, allowing them to focus on their research. "Their mission is to do research to get more grant money and graduate students," she says. "Their job is science." The pilot project also required Boston College to develop an "environmental management plan" describing how the college would meet a series of minimum performance criteria established by the EPA. That requirement, while not part of the proposed rule change, has allowed the college to coordinate compliance with federal environmental laws and overlapping regulations from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Excluded from the rule change are some proposals sought by college lobbyists that will have to wait to be considered as part of the agency's broader review of the resource-conservation law, which began last spring. Those changes would help the movement and consolidation of waste on campuses that are bisected by public roads. They also would allow smaller colleges to occasionally exceed the waste limit for the "small quantity generator" categories without being kicked into the "large quantity generator" group, which carries additional regulatory requirements. John DeLaHunt, assistant director for environmental health-and-safety services at Colorado College, says those changes would make a much bigger difference for small colleges than the proposed tweaks, since many smaller colleges are already exempt from the accumulation rules and storage time limits now being changed. Meanwhile, some EPA inspectors said that the proposed rule change will not signify the end of the crackdown on colleges. "When we start seeing better compliance," says Mr. Rota of Region 1, "we'll start focusing somewhere else." nwhen accumulation limits will be reached and arrange for a pickup within three days. WASTE-MANAGEMENT PENALTIES AT COLLEGES Since 1999 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has inspected hundreds of colleges and imposed millions of dollars in penalties. In order to reduce or eliminate such fines, institutions in some cases have agreed to conduct Supplemental Environmental Projects. Region 1 Region 6 Colleges inspected: 35 Cited: 11 Penalties: $1,074,637 Supplemental Environmental Projects: $2.68-million Colleges inspected: 14 Cited: 4 Penalties: $40,070 Supplemental Environmental Projects: $189,005 Region 21 Region 7 Colleges inspected: 40 Cited: 13 Penalties: $373,000 Supplemental Environmental Projects: $1.28-million Colleges inspected: 66 Cited: 4 Penalties: $290,143 Supplemental Environmental Projects: none Region 3 Region 8 Colleges inspected: 14 Cited: 6 Penalties: $171,622 Supplemental Environmental Projects: $53,780 Colleges inspected: 10 Cited: none Region 42 Region 93 Colleges inspected: 93 Cited: 2 Penalties: $50,349 Supplemental Environmental Projects: none Colleges inspected: 6 Cited: 1 Penalty: $505,000 Supplemental Environmental Projects: $1.2-million Region 5 Region 10 Colleges inspected: 18 Cited: 5 Penalties: $38,678 Supplemental Environmental Projects: none Colleges inspected: 26 Cited: 1 Penalty: $9,350 Supplemental Environmental Projects: none 1 Including Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands 2 Since September 30, 2000 3 Including Guam, Trust Territories, American Samoa, and Northern Mariana Islands Note: Some colleges had inspections on multiple campuses. PROPOSED RULES FOR WASTE MANAGEMENT ON CAMPUSES The Environmental Protection Agency is expected to issue the following rules in the coming months: Current Regulation Proposed Regulation Waste Determination Professors, researchers, and students who generate solid waste are responsible for determining whether the waste is regulated under the resource-conservation act, and for labeling it accordingly. The solid waste would be labeled with a list of its contents, its general hazard class, and the date it began to be accumulated, and would be sent to a central area, where an environmental-health-and-safety employee would determine whether it is regulated under the law. Waste Storage Each laboratory may accumulate up to 55 gallons of hazardous waste or one quart of acutely hazardous waste. Once that limit is met, the laboratory has three days to move the waste to a central accumulation area or ship it off-site. Each laboratory would have 30 days to remove the waste once the limit is met. Waste Treatment Colleges must obtain permits to treat hazardous waste on-site, in laboratories or accumulation areas. waste. Once that limit is met, the laboratory has three days to move the waste to a central accumulation area or ship it off-site. Colleges would not need a permit. SOURCES: Colleges and Universities Sector Coordinating Committee; Environmental Protection Agency http://chronicle.com Section: Government & Politics Volume 51, Issue 17, Page A25 Copyright © 2004 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
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