Changing politics at the EPA means shifting rules about what this waste incinerator can release into the environment

Many of the recent efforts to weaken various regulations seem to be “Trump trying to undo Obama for the sake of undoing Obama,” says Maxine Lipeles, director of the Interdisciplinary Environmental Clinic at the Washington University School of Law. So far, the current administration hasn’t made too big a dent in 50 years of environmental law. That could change, though.

“The people at the EPA—first Scott Pruitt and now Andrew Wheeler—came in with a very specific mission of rolling back a lot of environmental law, so in a sense, that’s more of a threat,” Lipeles says. “They have experience. Some of this they tried to do in the administration of George W. Bush and failed, and now they’re trying again.”

Lipeles’ clinic wrote a brief in support of the American Bottom Conservancy, a grassroots organization that was concerned about arsenic and other heavy metals floating out of the Veolia hazardous waste incinerators in Sauget, Illinois. “In the final days of the Obama administration, the EPA finalized an upgraded permit that required Veolia to continuously monitor which heavy metals were being released in a gaseous form,” says Lipeles, “and also do more monitoring of what kinds of waste they were feeding into this incinerator—how much arsenic, mercury, and lead. The company immediately appealed the permit, and the EPA caved.” 

In the words of an EPA spokesperson: “The January 2017 permit would have required Veolia to, among other things, install and operate, for a period of at least 12 calendar months, continuous multi-metals monitoring devices on each of Veolia’s three incineration units. In July 2018, EPA proposed to no longer require the multi-metals monitoring devices in the permit.” Instead, Veolia was to install activated carbon injection systems to remove mercury emissions from the two incinerators that didn’t have those systems yet. The company said this would better protect the environment than the continuous multi-metals monitoring. Veolia would continue to monitor its metal emissions with periodic sampling and analysis. 

“We are currently reviewing the many comments we received during the public comment period,” which ended in November, the spokesperson said. “EPA has not yet made a final decision on the revised permit.” Once the agency does finalize the permit, anyone still concerned about the absence of continous multi-metals monitoring would need to file a formal petition with the agency’s Environmental Appeals Board.