U.S. EPA hazardous waste classification and designation

¶ … U.S.-EPA consider to be hazardous waste. Are there any discrepancies in the regulations?.

The statutory regulations of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) designs hazardous waste as simply consisting of: a waste with a chemical composition or other properties that make it capable of causing illness, death, or some other harm to humans and other life forms when mismanaged or released into the environment (Environmental Protections Agency (EPA), 2005, p.2). The involved definition is, however, more complex than that particularly since a regulatory program structured for safe and immediate handling of hazardous waste demands a more rigid and tightly structured definition.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), therefore, worked at length to create tightly controlled definitions of the term so that adherence to the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) should be simpler and less confusing.

CFR §262.11 of the RCRA requires that any individual generating or producing a waste must determine if that waste is hazardous and, if so, dispose of it in the correct manner.

Regulatory and Statutory Definition of Waste

There are four steps of identification in the process:

1. Is the waste a solid waste

2. Is the waste excluded?

3. Is the waste a listed hazardous waste?

4. Does it exhibit a certain characteristic? (EPA. Waste identification.)

All of these categories revolve around identification the waste. This is not always easy since something that can seem waste matter to one person (e.g. aluminum) may be defined by another (e.g. A chemist) as valuable. RCRA, therefore, uses solid waste, which pertains to solid, semisolid or liquid -- any sort of waste. However, EPA later (EPA. Hazardous waste characteristics scooping study) elaborated on this distinction because of the above problem.

More so, one may consider that certain wastes should, because of their toxic component, be immediately eliminated. However, it may be impractical or unfair to impose regulations on these same wastes. Household wastes that can contain dangerous chemicals, like solvents and pesticides, are a case in point but subjecting household wastes to the strict RCRA requirements would be impractical. For this reason, too, RCRA has to determine which hazardous wastes should fall under their regulations and a homogenous definition of hazardous wastes should be sought (Environmental Protections Agency (EPA), 2005).

In very broad statutory terms, RCRA §1004(5) defines hazardous waste as:

A solid waste, or combination of solid waste, which because of its quantity, concentration, or physical, chemical, or infectious characteristics may (a) cause, or significantly contribute to, an increase in mortality or an increase in serious

irreversible, or incapacitating reversible, illness; or (b) pose a substantial present or potential hazard to human health or the environment when improperly treated, stored, transported, or disposed of, or otherwise managed (p.7)

Being an inadequate definition for the above reasons, the EPA sought to provide clearer distinctions so that waste handlers would be able to determine whether or not their wastes fall into the category of hazardous matter. It is the regulatory definition of hazardous waste -- rather than the statutory definition (in above quotation) that serves as guideline for the characteristics of hazardous waste.

EPA uses listings to determine whether wastes are hazardous, but listings can be confusing in more ways than one. Firstly, hazardous wastes are composed of an infinite diversity of chemicals all of which EPA would have to examine, one by one, to determine if their components are indeed hazardous. EPA lacks the resources to investigate this abundance of chemicals. Secondly, regulations are too general. For instance, some waste matters are defined as hazardous even though their composition under other circumstances may alter and lose their harm-inducing characteristics. By tightly constraining matter to lists, the EPA falls into the error of defining matter that is not hazardous as hazardous.

The heuristic that EPA uses to determine whether a substance is hazardous or not is via its question: "what properties or qualities can a waste have which cause that waste to be dangerous?" (EPA, 2005, p.9). For example possibility of inflammability is one characteristic that would deem a matter to be potentially dangerous. Laboratory tests are used, as far as possible, to determine existence of potentially harmful characteristics. However, testing can often be impractical (due to extensive and time and resource consuming procedures) as well as possibly dangerous to scientists concerned and, therefore, EPA relied on listings and characteristics to define hazardous wastes.

Listings and characteristics of hazardous waste

There are 4 different lists:

1. The F. list - Codified n §261.31, these wastes are designated as the F. list, referring, namely, to particular solid wastes from certain common industrial or manufacturing processes. Since these wastes can occur in industries across the spectrum, the EPA records these wastes as occurring in nonspecific industries.

2. The K. list - Elaborated on in §261.32, the K. list refers to particular hazardous and solid wastes from particular and specific sources.

3. The P. list - Codified in §261.32 and categorizing pure or commercial grade formulations of certain unused chemicals as hazardous.

4. The U. list -- also codified in §261.32 and similar to the P. list described above (EPA. Hazardous waste characteristics scooping study)

Each of these lists, ranging from allocating as many as 30 to several hundreds of matter as hazardous. Each are, again, based on various criteria to determine whether or not waste is indeed potentially hazardous.

The Listing Criteria for Hazardous Waste

The following four criteria are used by the EPA (EPA. Hazardous waste characteristics scooping study) in order to determine whether a waste should be included in the F, K.P. And U. lists as potentially hazardous:

1. Toxic listed wastes -- i.e. that the wastes definitely contain harmful chemicals and other components that will cause it to be a threat to the human and natural environment if left untreated.

2. Acutely hazardous wastes: namely that the wastes possess dangerous chemicals that will cause it to be hazardous when handles even when handled in a precautionary manner.

3. The waste matter exhibits one of the four characteristics of hazardous waste matter: ignitability, corrosiveness, reactivity, and/or toxicity.

4. Or for some other reason, the waste matter seems to fit within the category of hazardous waste in the statutory definition laid down by Congress.

Most listed wastes fall into the toxic waste category, and here EPA first determines whether the matter contains any harmful chemical components. This is done by consulting a list of harmful chemical compounds (Environmental Protections Agency (EPA). Solvents study). Acutely hazardous wastes are the second most common category and these are defined so if any of the most acutely harmful chemical compounds listed in Appendix VIII of Part 261 are inherent in the matter even in small doses.