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Module 1 |
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RCRA/HSWA
EPA's Office of Solid and Hazardous Waste administers the program to manage these wastes. RCRA is divided into several sections, called 'subtitles':
Subtitle D deals with non-hazardous solid wastes, such as municipal waste, in-situ mining waste, agricultural runoff, household hazardous waste, domestic sewage sludge, cement kiln dust, to name just a few. These wastes are excluded from being a hazardous waste, no matter what they contain, or however poisonous they may be.
Subtitle C deals with hazardous waste. The major goals of this law are waste minimization and the regulation of hazardous waste from "cradle to grave": from the point of generation on, over storage, transportation, treatment and disposal these wastes are documented and monitored. Ideally, nothing should get lost, everything should be accounted for. In 1995 nearly 20,000 hazardous waste generators produced 279 million tons of hazardous waste regulated by RCRA.
RCRA Links:
http://www.epa.gov/epaoswer/general/risk/risk-1.pdf
http://www.epa.gov/epaoswer/general/risk/risk-2.pdf
A waste stream can become a "hazardous waste" in a number of ways (see outline):
Listed wastes: The waste is listed as one of over 500 specific hazardous wastes published from the EPA. These wastes are separated in groups (F-, K-, P-, U-list), depending on the type of waste.
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Example of a listed waste: K002: Wastewater treatment sludge from the production of chrome yellow and orange pigments |
Wastes on these list are "hazardous waste," regardless of the concentration of their constituents. A mixture of a non-hazardous waste with one of the listed wastes automatically becomes a hazardous waste!
Characteristic wastes: EPA has identified four characteristics of hazardous waste, that are used to test solid waste streams:
toxcicity
corrosivity
reactivity
ignitability
If the waste falls into any of the four standardized tests it is considered a hazardous waste.
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Why do you think corrosivity was included in the characteristics? |
Famous example: the Supreme Court decided in May 1994, that the incinerator ash that comes out of a municipal waste incinerator must be tested according to these criteria. If the ash fails, it is then deposited, at enormous costs, at a hazardous waste landfill.
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Remember: municipal waste by itself was an excluded waste - it is a non-hazardous solid waste! |
Before we go into specific problems of the Superfund sites, I want you to take a moment and look at the hierarchy of waste management.
The first and foremost goal should be to prevent the waste in the first place (pollution prevention, called "P2" in industry jargon). If that is not possible or feasible, the waste stream should be reduced (known as source reduction or waste minimization). Thirdly, recycling, re-use and recovery can be used for industrial hazardous waste: recovery of landfill-gas, "internet-based waste exchanges", to name just these two. At the bottom of this hierarchy we find treatment, storage and disposal. But it is at this level where we focus our attention, laws and regulations, our technology and money!
EPA’s Pollution Prevention webpage (http://www.epa.gov/ebtpages/pollutionprevention.html) and the National Waste Minimization Program (http://www.epa.gov/wastemin/) are two good starting points if you are interested in exploring this topic.
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Module 1
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