CHAPTER 1 RCRA JURISDICTION AND BEVILL ISSUES

JurisdictionUnited States
RCRA and CERCLA
(Apr 1997)

CHAPTER 1
RCRA JURISDICTION AND BEVILL ISSUES

Van E. Housman *
Environmental Protection Agency Office of Solid Waste
Washington, D.C.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is currently engaged in a court-ordered rulemaking process that has significant implications for the mining and mineral processing industry. EPA has completed a preliminary review of comments made to its January 25, 1996 proposed rule. (See 61 FR 2338). Based on this review and on a settlement agreement with the litigants (the Environmental Defense Fund), EPA plans to publish an April 15, 1997 proposed rule that adds new options and other discussions for comment. Both proposed rules will be addressed in a final rule to be published on April 15, 1998, in compliance with the settlement agreement.

As part of the settlement agreement with the Environmental Defense Fund, under authority of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), EPA proposed a rule on January 25, 1996 to establish treatment standards for newly identified mineral processing wastes. In addition, EPA proposed rules that would specify when mineral processing secondary materials would be classified as "solid wastes" under RCRA when they are generated and reused within the mineral processing industry. While EPA recognizes that some mineral processing operations process materials in land-based units (e.g., surface impoundments), EPA is concerned about the potential for environmental releases from these units. EPA is attempting to identify those practices that indicate that discard is occurring (and therefore is part of the waste management problem) so that it may apply RCRA requirements.

EPA considers secondary mineral processing wastes to be "newly identified" because they were brought into the RCRA Subtitle C system after the date of the enactment of the Hazardous and Solid Waste Act Amendments in 1984, and therefore are now subject to RCRA's Land Disposal Restrictions (LDR). EPA made an effort to identify those wastes that would be covered by the LDRs in technical background documents to the January proposal. The January proposal would place the same land disposal restrictions on those wastes as exist for similar wastes in other industries. The proposal also discussed the possibility of conditionally exempting certain hazardous wastes from the RCRA Definition of Solid Waste if they were reused. EPA's goal is to allow secondary materials to be reprocessed in a beneficial...

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