Earlier this week, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) formally denied a petition from 2011 for rulemaking that sought to “revise the regulatory threshold for defining waste as corrosive from the current value of pH 12.5, to pH 11.5; and expand the scope of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) corrosivity definition to include non-aqueous wastes in addition to the aqueous wastes currently regulated.” The group petitioning EPA, the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) and Dr. Cate Jenkins, PhD, erroneously claimed that had the RCRA standard included the above requested language in 2001 there would have been fewer injuries to first responders on September 11, 2001 and the years following.
NRMCA, along with industry partners, advocated against such changes to the RCRA standard and correctly argued that such changes would not have had an impact on the 9/11 first responders as their injuries were conclusively not related to corrosivity issues. After fielding public comments in 2016, EPA moved to deny the rulemaking petition but failed to formalize the denial. While better late than never, the EPA has now formally denied PEER’s petition on the basis of many industry arguments from 2016. NRMCA applauds EPA’s actions to deny movement on PEER’s petition. Amending the RCRA standard as the petition aimed to do would have caused unnecessary and burdensome changes to how concrete operations are conducted and ready mixed concrete is manufactured. NRMCA will continue to monitor the issue for any following petitions.
Click here to review EPA’s Denial of Petition published in the Federal Register. For more information, contact Kevin Walgenbach at kwalgenbach@nrmca.org.
National Ready Mixed Concrete Association