Hazardous Choice: EPA Proposes Competing Coal Ash Rules

On May 13, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued its long-awaited coal combustion residue (CCR) proposal, which presents a stark choice between handling CCR under a draconian hazardous waste regime and following past EPA determinations to handle the material as a low-risk solid waste. While EPA reportedly favored the hazardous waste approach, strong pressure from industry and state regulators and from within the Obama administration encouraged the dual draft. The resulting proposal vividly documents the extraordinary costs of listing and handling CCR as a hazardous waste and the less costly, but still difficult, problems of handling CCR as a solid waste. Under both scenarios, generators of CCR face additional burdens and those burdens will extend to historic sites where CCR has been disposed previously.