The Sierra Club would like your help at some EPA public hearings.
The EPA has proposed two rules to regulate toxic coal ash, and they’re going to hold only five hearings across the country to hear from citizens. One of those hearings is going to be in Dallas, Texas, on September 8th, so we are putting all hands on deck to make sure that there’s a powerful voice demanding a strong coal ash rule.
Not sure what coal ash is? It’s all the waste produced when burning coal (you can imagine how toxic it is). It may look like dirt, but it tastes like a Superfund site: monitoring data at 31 coal ash sites found arsenic, lead, selenium, cadmium, thallium antimony, mercury, boron, sulfate, and more exceeding drinking water standards in groundwater at 26 of the sites.
Right now, coal companies are free to put it wherever they like, usually in ponds, landfills, and uncovered earthen pits.
The EPA has proposed a strong option, which would classify coal ash as hazardous waste, and under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act Subtitle C, the EPA would have the power to federally enforce the following requirements: getting a permit for a disposal site, require effective clean-up in the case of a leak, groundwater monitoring, and storage sites. The soft option means continuing to classify coal ash as solid waste, which means that the regulation would be state-to state and enforcement would depend on the oh-so-easy citizen lawsuits. If you remember Pirates of the Caribbean, the soft option is kind of like Pirate Code. It’s more of a guidelines, really, which means Elizabeth Turner is still going to be a prisoner on the Black Pearl and coal companies are still going to dump coal ash wherever they like.
Click over to learn more, including what the options are, what coal ash is, and where it is, in Texas and elsewhere. Did you read that Chron story from Sunday about the fight over “flex permits”? Wouldn’t you like to know just exactly what the Fayette Power Project is doing with all of the ash it generates? Then sign up to help out. They’ll get you to the Dallas hearing if you need a ride. We have one chance in Texas to tell the EPA what we want them to do about this, so let’s take advantage of it.
The main difference between the “Strong” and “Soft” options is who enforces the standards. (Strong=federal EPA and Soft=state EPAs). The landfill engineering standards EPA is proposing are essentially THE SAME under both options.
Unfortunately, the Strong option brings with it a “hazardous waste” label that will ruin opportunities to safely recycle the material in products like concrete. When coal ash is recycled in concrete it replaces materials that are just as “toxic” as the coal ash and saves millions of tons of greenhouse gas emissions in the process. Using the Strong option just to give EPA enforcement authority risks inadvertently destroying one of the most successful recycling programs in history.
Yes, disposal standards need to be improved. But we need to do it in a way that won’t destroy safe and environmentally beneficial recycling.