EPA Drops Toxic Waste Rules Overhaul : Environment: Agency backs down on hazardous materials plan in face of strong opposition.

The Environmental Protection Agency, facing bitter opposition from environmentalists and state officials, Monday dropped a planned overhaul of the nation’s hazardous waste rules.

In a prepared statement, EPA Director William K. Reilly said that talks with “interested parties” have convinced him “to take our proposal off the table.” The agency said that it plans more public hearings and that it will develop a new plan within the next 12 to 24 months.

The latest twist in the 12-year-old struggle occurred as the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee was about to begin hearings on the proposal and after attorneys general from at least 42 states strongly criticized it.

The decision also came a day before the Hazardous Waste Treatment Council and the Sierra Club were prepared to release a report claiming that the new guidelines--first proposed five months ago--would have exposed 13,000 additional people to unsafe drinking water, created 1,800 new hazardous waste sites and generated cleanup requirements that would cost $10 billion to $50 billion.

Some observers suggested that withdrawal of the proposal stemmed at least in part from the Bush Administration’s growing sensitivity to political criticism of its environmental and regulatory records.

Most of that criticism has been focused on Vice President Dan Quayle’s Competitiveness Council, which has been at constant odds with the EPA over the writing of a host of environmental regulations, including language to implement the 1990 Clean Air Act. The council had pressured the EPA to ease the hazardous waste regulations.

Under the proposed regulations, the EPA would have established a new risk level for hazardous wastes and allowed an exemption for wastes that posed low levels of risk. It also suggested that waste be defined by the amount of contaminant it contains and not by whether it is derived from a hazardous material.

Critics charged that the new definition would have allowed as much as 90% of hazardous wastes now disposed of under carefully controlled circumstances to be taken to conventional landfills along with other garbage. The EPA had countered that only about 10% of the wastes now considered hazardous would be affected.

Among those urging a delay in implementing the new rules was California EPA chief James M. Strock, who concluded that they required “significant modification.”

The issues addressed by the proposed regulations have been at the center of a struggle going back to 1980, when Shell Oil Co. sued the EPA on grounds that its rules for disposing of hazardous waste were unnecessarily stringent.

Under those rules, a waste is subject to special treatment if it is mixed with, or derived from, a substance that is considered hazardous.

The case remained in the legal system until last December, when a federal court ruled that the EPA had erred in developing its original hazardous waste definition by putting it into place without sufficient notice or opportunity for comment.

While the court fight wore on, the EPA operated under the 1980 definition, which industry has long argued is too broad and requires special treatment for tons of wastes that do not pose an environmental threat if mixed with a non-hazardous waste or treated chemically.

The court ruling led to the new regulations proposed in April.

Today, Colorado Gov. Roy Romer, state officials from Tennessee and New York, and Democratic Sens. Timothy E. Wirth of Colorado and Max Baucus of Montana plan a news conference in Washington at which the Hazardous Waste Treatment Council, the Sierra Club and the Environmental Defense Fund intend to release a report blasting the EPA’s proposal.

“At the insistence of senior Administration officials,” the report says, “the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has proposed to exempt from federal control roughly 90% of the most toxic class of hazardous wastes.”

“Once exempted, these wastes would no longer be subject to stringent environmental controls and could be dumped into municipal landfills along with the nation’s garbage or put into unlined, pits, ponds or piles.”

By the EPA’s estimates, the new rules would have exempted 10 million to 90 million tons of material containing toxic constituents. But the report by the Hazardous Waste Treatment Council contends that 315 million tons of the most toxic wastes, contaminated pesticides, dioxin and other carcinogenic compounds could be allowed into the environment by the proposed rules.

Particularly worrisome, said Richard Fortuna, the council’s executive director, was the fact that the arrangement would have basically left determination of hazardous wastes to the producer.