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  4. Environmental Groups Ask EPA to Remove Exemption for Wastewater Treatment Units

Environmental Groups Ask EPA to Remove Exemption for Wastewater Treatment Units

Date: October 5, 2011

Source: News Room

Some major activists are asking EPA to repeal its "temporary" 31-year-old exemption for wastewater treatment units (WTUs) from having to abide by hazardous waste rules. Their petition to EPA is not new. Beginning 13 years ago in 1998, environmental groups, including the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), petitioned EPA to repeal the "temporary" exemption under the Resource Conservation & Recovery Act (RCRA) that the agency promulgated in 1980. In the original petition, environmentalists argued that EPA promulgated the exemption "without providing notice or opportunity for public comment, and without demonstrating -- or even suggesting -- that there was any factual basis to believe human health and the environment could be adequately protected without meaningful RCRA controls." WTUs can "pose significant risks" and "retention of the exemption violates the statutory mandate of [RCRA] to protect humanhealth and the environment," the petition says.

The petition says that WTUs "are tanks managing wastewaters subsequently discharged either to Publicly Owned Treatment Works (POTWS, more commonly called municipal sewage plants) or surface waters. When discharged, the wastewaters are subject to Clean Water Act requirements, but the tanks themselves are not regulated under that statute" and therefore, "leaks from the tanks to groundwater, and air releases from the tanks are," for the most part, unregulated.

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