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TRENTON
- Attorney General Anne Milgram announced
today that New Jersey has signed onto a
federal lawsuit seeking to invalidate U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency regulations
that weaken federal reporting requirements
imposed on facilities that use and dispose
of many toxic chemicals.
Filed
by New York in U.S. District Court for the
Southern District of New York, the lawsuit
takes issue with new regulations published
by EPA in 2006. The regulations relax toxic
chemical reporting requirements imposed
under the federal Toxic Release Inventory
(TRI) program.
According
to Milgram, the TRI program requires facilities
that use and dispose of a wide variety of
toxic chemicals - in excess of certain reporting
threshold levels - to file annual reports.
The annual reports disclose, among other
things, the amount of the chemicals released
into the air, water and ground, and the
maximum amount of the chemicals stored on
site. The TRI program does not impose limits
on the amount of pollution that a facility
can emit, although it requires that the
facility report information concerning its
toxic chemical use and disposal to EPA and
to state government in the facility's home
state. The information is then made available
to the general public via an Internet data
base.
On December 22, 2006, the EPA published
regulations that, according to the federal
lawsuit, will result in less reporting by
facilities using and disposing of toxic
chemicals because the new regulations unlawfully
raise the threshold reporting levels required
under TRI.
"It
is our position that the new EPA regulations
dilute accountability standards for those
facilities who use, store and dispose of
toxic chemicals by weakening the threshold
reporting requirements under TRI,"
said Attorney General Milgram.
"This
rule change is a move in the wrong direction,''
said Department of Environmental Protection
Commissioner Lisa P. Jackson.
"New
Jersey's Pollution Prevention program has
reporting requirements that are even tougher
than the EPA's current Toxic Release Inventory
standards,” Commissioner Jackson noted.
“The federal government should emulate
these requirements, not step back from what
it already has in place.''
New
Jersey has its own toxic chemicals reporting
program, but the new EPA regulations will
still result in a loss of data on waste
transfers coming into the state from other
states. In addition, the EPA's relaxing
of the TRI reporting thresholds has created
confusion within the regulated community
in New Jersey as to the exact nature of
the current reporting requirements.
The lawsuit to which New Jersey has
signed on seeks, among other things:
-
Invalidation of new, less stringent
EPA reporting thresholds for one of
the most dangerous categories of chemicals,
the persistent, bio-accumulative and
toxic (PBT) compounds
-
Invalidation of new, less stringent
reporting thresholds for certain non-PBT
compounds
- Declaration
by the court that the loss of TRI data
for local communities renders EPA's
action arbitrary and capricious
- Invalidation
of the increased, allowable annual threshold
of reportable chemical amounts by facilities
In
addition to New York and New Jersey, Arizona,
California, Connecticut, Illinois, Maine,
Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire,
Pennsylvania and Vermont have signed onto
the federal lawsuit.
>>
View Complaint - part
I I part
II (3.9 / 3.6mb pdfs)
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