Category: News

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) invites small businesses to participate in a Small Business Advocacy Review (SBAR) panel on a proposed rule that would establish financial responsibility requirements for classes of facilities within the hard rock mining industry. The requirements will help ensure that owners and operators of the facilities, not taxpayers, foot the bill for environmental cleanup.  

The panel will ask a selected group of Small Entity Representatives (SERs), to provide advice and recommendations on the proposed rule to the panel. EPA seeks self-nominations directly from small entities that may be subject to the rule requirements. Self-nominations may be submitted through the link below and must be received by December 20, 2010.

The requirements will be developed under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act, commonly called Superfund.

The Regulatory Flexibility Act requires EPA to establish a federal panel for rules that may have a significant economic impact on a substantial number of small entities.  The SBAR panel will include representatives from the Small Business Administration, the Office of Management and Budget and EPA. 

More information: http://www.epa.gov/sbrefa/hardrockmining.htm

With U.S. EPA taking intense criticism from Republicans and businesses, Administrator Lisa Jackson said today her 40-year-old agency is battling a new problem: Americans are taking a healthy environment for granted. When EPA was created in 1970, Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River was so polluted that it caught fire. Pittsburgh and Los Angeles were choking on smog on a daily basis. And the widespread use of DDT and other toxic chemicals was killing off bald eagles — the very symbol of the United States.

The nation’s rivers aren’t burning anymore, Jackson said. The air is clean enough that many people don’t notice it. Struggling species have rebounded. But because younger people have no memories of those days, they might not realize why the agency was created in the first place, she said.

Critics say EPA has already picked all the low-hanging fruit in the Clean Air Act and other statutes. But Jackson said there are still ways for the agency to address public health and the environment — especially by imposing more rules on electric utilities.

Read the complete article at the New York Times

By Kelly M. Pyrek

The healthcare industry is rife with opportunities to reduce the environmental impact it creates, with the added benefits of institutional financial gain, improved patient outcomes, better staff health and reduced turnover, and community benefit, according to a report from Practice Greenhealth and from the Institute for Innovation in Large Organizations.(1) An increasing number of healthcare institutions are endeavoring to reuse, recycle and repurpose medical supplies and devices to promote better sustainability.

“With the healthcare sector accounting for a large part of the U.S. carbon footprint – 8 percent, according to a 2009 JAMA study(2) – industry involvement in and support of sustainability efforts is no longer a question of ‘why’ or ‘when,’ but of ‘how,’” says Lars Thording, senior director of marketing and public affairs for Ascent Healthcare Solutions. “Although a commitment to sustainability is about reducing environmental impact, it is also inexorably tied to the issues of cost and quality care. These are top issues in the burgeoning reform of healthcare. A sustainability measure is not realistic and cannot be effectively implemented if it does not take into account impacts to cost and patient care.” Thording continues, “A positive sign of progress is that hospital sustainability coordinators and green teams are on the rise. They are helping to guide purchasing decisions and are formulating policies for hospital employees. But a green team isn’t enough. Nurses on the hospital floor, surgeons in the OR, administrators and suppliers are all a part of the solution.”

Healthcare professionals should be conscious of how healthcare contributes to the waste stream. “The hospital industry generates multiple types of waste that can be categorized into 10 waste streams,” explains Debra Gillmeister, MBA, a director for Stericycle’s healthcare service division. “Eighty percent are highly regulated, such as regulated medical waste (RMW), pharmaceutical waste and hazardous waste. Each of these must be properly segregated and disposed of to insure that the environment is protected and that laws and regulations are followed. Effective segregation diminishes total waste and the facilities’ carbon footprint.” Gillmeister is a former advisory board member for the American Hospital Association’s American Society for Healthcare Environmental Services.

Read more:

The National Community Pharmacists Association said Tuesday that it fully supports a proposed rule from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services that requires pharmacies to only dispense brand name drugs in seven-day cycles in long-term care facilities, instead of the existing 30-day cycle. 

The shortened number of days is an attempt to limit pharmaceutical waste in the healthcare system and support independent pharmacies. The NCPA, which created a Long-Term Care Division this year to advocate for patients and pharmacies in long-term care settings, sent CMS a letter in June requesting this change.

Read the NCPA June letter to CMS:

The U.S. Department of Energy Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) is conducting a series of Webinars to explain the origin, goals and schedule for the development of the Workforce Guidelines for Home Energy Upgrades.

The guidelines are designed to strengthen the Weatherization Assistance Program and foster the growth of a high-quality home energy retrofit industry and a skilled and credentialed workforce. They can be adopted by the WAP network and retrofit programs nationwide seeking to increase the consistency and effectiveness of the work performed, and utilized by training providers to improve course curriculum and training materials.

During the Webinar, you will learn how the draft guidelines were developed, how you can contribute, and what’s in store with respect to implementation.

The presentation will take place twice:

• Thursday, December 9, 12―1 p.m. Pacific Standard Time
• Wednesday, December 15, 11AM―12PM Pacific Standard Time

Title: Workforce Guidelines for Home Energy Upgrades: Update & Opportunities to Engage.

Presenter: Benjamin Goldstein, Project Lead, Workforce Guidelines for Home Energy Upgrades, U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE).

Register to attend the Webinar
The online seminar is free of charge, but you must register in advance to obtain a URL for the presentation and call-in phone number. For more information, or to read and comment on these materials, please visit the Residential Retrofit Guidelines page of the EERE Web site.

EPA has identified a list of 134 additional chemicals to be screened (in addition to 67 that are already being screened) for their potential to disrupt the endocrine system which regulates growth, metabolism and reproduction. After public comment and review, EPA will issue test orders to pesticide registrants and manufacturers requiring them to determine whether their chemicals disrupt the estrogen, androgen and thyroid pathways of the endocrine system. EPA will begin issuing orders for this second group of 134 chemicals beginning in 2011. More information: http://www.epa.gov/endo

EPA reported a decrease in average carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and a slight increase in the average fuel efficiency for new light duty vehicles in its 2010 fuel economy trends annual report. The report provides data on the CO2 emissions, fuel economy and improved technology of new light-duty vehicles (cars, minivans, sport utility vehicles, and pickup trucks), that account for 50 percent of vehicle sales. Technologies such as hybrid-electric vehicles, clean diesel and variable displacement engines are helping to cut our oil addiction and reducing global warming. For information on the report: ‘Light-Duty Automotive Technology, Carbon Dioxide Emissions, and Fuel Economy Trends: 1975 through 2010,’ go to http://www.epa.gov/otaq/fetrends.htm

Launch of a National Research Council Study, Incorporating Sustainability in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

An ad hoc committee under the Science and Technology for Sustainability Program (STS) will author a consensus report for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s Office of Research and Development (ORD) to help define their efforts to incorporate sustainability concepts into agency programs. This study will build on existing sustainability efforts that ORD has conducted by strengthening the analytic and scientific basis for sustainability as it applies to human health and environmental protection within the Agency’s decision-making process. The study will address such questions as:

1. What should be the operational framework for sustainability for EPA?
2. How can the EPA decision-making process rooted for more than two decades in the risk assessment/risk management paradigm be integrated into this new sustainability framework?
3. What scientific and analytical tools are needed to support the framework?
4. What set of strategic metrics and indicators should EPA build to determine if sustainable approaches are or are not being employed successfully?
5. Which assessment techniques and accounting protocols should the Agency adopt to inform ongoing efforts to improve Agency sustainability practices and procedures?

In addition, the committee will make recommendations to strengthen the Agency’s transdisciplinary sustainability science research program by answering the following questions: What are the core questions for a sustainability science research program at EPA? What characteristics are indicative of a research program that is addressing sustainability?

The National Research Council (NRC) study will seek to operationalize the risk assessment/risk management (RA/RM) paradigm within a sustainability framework. This study will build on the advice in the NRC report Risk Assessment in the Federal Government: Managing the Process, the 2009 report Science and Decisions: Advancing Risk Assessment as well as other pertinent literature on the RA/RM process.

The committee will also build on the advice in the NRC’s recently completed report Evaluating Research Efficiency in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as well as EPA’s innovation programs and the extensive literature on U.S. and global efforts to incorporate sustainability into environmental protection programs.

The study will be widely disseminated to interested audiences within federal and state governments, industry, universities and nongovernmental organizations. It will inform the STS companion study, “Sustainability Linkages in the Federal Government,” which will examine critical links between key sectors that need to be considered by federal science and resource management agencies.