EPA Proposal on Dumping of Chemicals Draws Fire

The Environmental Protection Agency, ordered by Congress to devise rules to prevent deadly poisons from leaking from landfills into water supplies, proposed new standards Thursday that would leave almost all of the chemicals unaffected for two years past a November deadline and would allow for continued leaks thereafter.

Environmentalists and a key congressman contend that the complex new rules, which the EPA will unveil at a news conference today, will do little to end contamination from leaking dumps.

“We’re completely outraged,” said Linda Greer, a scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund. “This is really one of the worst things I have seen come out of the agency in this Administration.”

The highly technical proposal, which EPA officials stressed is preliminary and may be changed, sets out the methodology for establishing the amounts of contaminants that would continue to be allowed to be dumped in landfills.

Under the proposal, 90% of the 1.7 million gallons of solvents disposed of each year could continue to be dumped in landfills for two years after the November cutoff sought by Congress. EPA officials said that a two-year delay is necessary because the technology necessary to treat those wastes is not now available in sufficient quantity.

But Rep. Dennis E. Eckart (D-Ohio), who authored the language calling for the new standards, charged that the agency “seems more concerned about minimizing the law than minimizing the threats.”

“The capacity argument is one that I have heard ad nauseam,” he said. “The industry and the regulators have been put on adequate notice since this bill was signed into law and they have done nothing but show a propensity to waive deadlines.”

Eckart said the law, passed in 1984, specified that no hazardous material that would leak or migrate into the environment was to be disposed of in a landfill.

“When we said no migration, we meant no migration,” he said. “We made it absolutely clear that land disposal should be used only as the last resort and only if human health was fully protected.”

‘No Backbone’

Eckart accused the EPA of showing “no backbone” and pledged to call for a congressional hearing on the agency’s 600-page proposal if he is not satisfied after meeting with EPA officials next week.

The EPA, calling its proposal the “most important regulations affecting hazardous waste management” in years, said the levels of treatment envisioned are based on the availability of treatment technology.

Eileen Claussen, a director in the EPA’s solid waste programs office, said criticism of the proposal is “inaccurate” and based on the most conservative parts of the proposal, which she said, taken as a whole, represent “about 25 steps forward.”

“The rules say the wastes should be restricted at various levels, but there isn’t sufficient capacity to treat those wastes right now,” she said.

Denies Health Risks

The amounts and concentrations of substances that would seep into the ground would not pose health risks, Claussen said.

“It would be at such tiny, tiny levels--so tiny that at the point of exposure where somebody might drink it, it would have no effect,” she added. However, environmentalists disagree with the EPA over what constitutes a hazardous level of exposure.

The proposal most strongly criticized would allow leakage of contaminants as long as they would not be hazardous at a distance of 500 feet from a dump. Under the proposal, Greer said, trichloroethane, a chemical associated with increased birth defects in the Silicon Valley, would be permitted to leak at concentrations of at least 6,500 times the EPA’s own health standard of 15 parts per billion.

Greer said the new rules ignore exposure to chemicals from the air, fail to consider the toxicity of the waste, rely on unrealistically optimistic expectations of the ability of landfill liners to prevent leaks, and grossly underestimate the technology available to treat them.

Toxicologist’s Approval

EPA officials noted that Ellen K. Silbergeld, chief toxicologist for the Environmental Defense Fund, voted with other members of an independent EPA scientific advisory board last April to approve the methodology used in devising the proposals.

Silbergeld could not be reached for comment, but in a prepared statement released by her organization she criticized the proposal as “reminiscent of the bad old days of Rita Lavelle,” the former EPA official who was severely criticized for her handling of the Superfund cleanup. Greer, meanwhile, said the proposal had “changed substantially” since Silbergeld reviewed it.