Washington State recently announced that PFAS are “hazardous substances” regulated under the State’s environmental cleanup laws. The Department of Ecology (“Ecology”) announced its decision online stating that, because “PFAS compounds all have multiple carbon-fluorine bonds,” such “forever chemicals” are already within the State’s existing definition of hazardous substances.[i] Ecology went on to say that releases of PFAS that may threaten human health or the environment in any media must be reported to State regulators, followed by site assessment and, potentially, cleanup. The agency did not define what specific levels would trigger reporting.[ii] That judgment appears to be left to the entity doing the reporting. In doing so, Washington became perhaps the first state in the country to define PFAS in a way that could construe the entire class of PFAS compounds as hazardous substances in a regulatory context.
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Category: News Archive
On October 18, 2021, EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan announced the PFAS Strategic Roadmap: EPA’s Commitments to Action 2021-2024 (Roadmap). The Roadmap is intended to be a comprehensive approach to confronting PFAS contamination nationwide. Among many other efforts, the Roadmap includes the following planned actions:
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Today, EPA has made available updated 2020 Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) data about chemical releases, chemical waste management, and pollution prevention activities that took place during 2020 at more than 21,000 federal and industrial facilities throughout the United States and its territories. This dataset builds on the preliminary data released in July. It includes revised and late submissions from facilities, and additional data quality checks by EPA.
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FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. — One humid day this summer, Brian Long, a senior executive at the chemical company Chemours, took a reporter on a tour of the Fayetteville Works factory.
Mr. Long showed off the plant’s new antipollution technologies, designed to stop a chemical called GenX from pouring into the Cape Fear River, escaping into the air and seeping into the ground water.
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The Superfund is on its way back.
Originally enacted in 1980 as the Hazardous Waste Contamination Act, the Superfund was an excise tax assessed against the chemical, oil and gas industries, according to John Beaty, general manager over excise tax at Avalara. “It hit anyone who used items from a certain list of chemicals that could potentially lead to contaminated sites,” he said.
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The Environmental Protection Agency is considering adding a portion of Bear Creek in Eastern Baltimore County to its list of Superfund cleanup sites. It’s tied to the years-long cleanup of the old Bethlehem Steel site at Sparrows Point.
The state is spearheading the cleanup of the property while the federal government is charged with cleaning up the water around it, which includes Bear Creek.
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Members of the environmental justice movement sent an email blast more than 5,600 times over a 48-hour period to top Biden administration officials, disrupting White House communication and sparking a tense exchange between the administration’s chief environmental outreach official and one of the key leaders of the movement.
The form-letter blast effectively shut down email communication over two August days between high-ranking Biden administration officials, including national climate adviser Gina McCarthy, her deputy Ali Zaidi, National Economic Council Director Brian Deese and David Kieve, who leads outreach to environmental groups for the White House, according to Erika Thi Patterson, campaign director with the Action Center on Race and the Economy, and two others familiar with the incident.
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Season 2 Kickoff w/ Max Conway
Welcome back for Season 2 where you’ll meet unique candidates on the ballot this November with important messages for statewide candidates next year.
Max Conway from Dunmore, Lackawanna, County, has only been eligible to vote for about a decade. Yet, he is poised to be Mayor in January. He discusses his impressive grassroots social media-driven campaign and a heated public policy debate in Lackawanna County.
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NEW ORLEANS — A major manufacturer of synthetic rubber, Firestone Polymers LLC, has agreed to pay $4 million in fines and an environmental project and make numerous improvements to settle a long list of state and federal air pollution complaints at its plant in southwest Louisiana.
The plant in Sulphur was “Louisiana’s highest emitter of three types of hazardous air pollutants,” violating the Clean Air Act, David Gray, regional administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, said in a news release Thursday.
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