EPA Shocks Environmentalists - Gets It Right!

This story goes under the heading of "man bites dog." It has been very rare these last few years to hear a well respected environmentalist say good things about an EPA ruling. So this needed to be posted upon.

It appears the EPA back in mid-November decided to crack down on medical waste incinerators. It originally issued standards for these sites back in 1997 (a ruling that was successfully challenged in court by Sierra Club), and the result then was that most small operations, those run at individual hospitals, shut down and shipped their wastes to larger operations. But this latest ruling, published in the Federal Register yesterday takes it all to a new level.

In an article from the Washington Post some startling excerpts follow;

"This is the first time I've ever seen them do an air toxic rule right," said Jim Pew, a lawyer at Earthjustice, a Calif.-based environmental advocacy group that sued the agency over its initial proposal for regulating the incinerators more than a decade ago. "It's a big cut in emissions."
[...]
EPA estimates that the proposed rule would cut the amount of air pollution from medical incinerators by 468,000 pounds to 1,520,000 pounds per year, though it did not provide an estimate of current emissions. Mercury emissions, which cause neurological damage in children, would drop by 637 to 682 pounds annually, and cancer-causing dioxin emissions would drop by about 40 grams.

According to an agency fact sheet, "The proposed emission limits would require improvements in performance for all of the 57 currently operating" medical incinerators. It will cost these facilities $21.1 million a year to comply with the new standards, though they could use alternative disposal methods to meet the rules at half the cost, the agency said.

The rules represent a significant change from the EPA's 1997 proposal, which Earthjustice successfully challenged in court on behalf of the Sierra Club. In almost every instance, the agency has reduced the amount of allowable pollutants by at least a factor of 10: Acceptable hydrogen chloride levels will drop from 15 parts per million in the atmosphere to 0.75 per million.

"This is really remarkable," Pew said.

What's next?