Cozad, David, U.S. EPA Region 7, EPA Enforcement and Next Generation Compliance, at 2014 Missouri Hazardous Waste Seminar, November, 4, 2014, Columbia, MO
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Cozad, David, U.S. EPA Region 7, EPA Enforcement and Next Generation Compliance, at 2014 Missouri Hazardous Waste Seminar, November, 4, 2014, Columbia, MO
1. EPA Enforcement and Next
Generation Compliance
Missour i Hazardous Waste Seminar
Dave Cozad, U.S. EPA
November 4, 2014
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
1
2. Why Next Generation Compliance?
2
Noncompliance
Information on compliance often not readily
available
Government resources not adequate to
address large regulated universe relying
exclusively on singe facility inspection
enforcement model
Not getting all the benefits expected from our
rules and permits
3. Technology Paradigm Change
3
Credit: CitiSense Air Quality Monitoring Mobile Sensors, University of California, San Diego,
Jacobs School of Engineering. See:
http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/pressrelease/small_portable_sensors_allow_users_to_monitor_expos
ure_to_pollution_on_thei
4. 1. More effective rules and permits
4
Rules structured to promote compliance
Simplicity
Designed to make
compliance the default
Market mechanisms –
efficiency and clarity
Transparency as
accountability tool
Self and third-party
certifications
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
5. 2. Advanced monitoring technologies
5
Real-time monitoring –
knowing about pollution
as it’s happening
Facility feedback loops –
preventing pollution
before it happens
Fenceline monitoring
Community monitoring
Remote sensing
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Passive diffusion tubes can be placed at a facility’s
boundary and is a low-cost way to measure air
toxics
6. Advanced monitoring
6
Making the invisible visible
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
9. Example - Using Advanced Monitoring To Persuade & Prove
Passive FTIR Open-Path Monitor
Testing of flares to
determine combustion
efficiency
PFTIR works by
measuring flare plume
gases
9
10. Advanced monitoring
10
An example from flaring enforcement
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
11. 3. Electronic reporting
11
Information technologies
make new solutions possible
Smart tools and 2-way
communication
Private sector reporting tools
Ohio NPDES e-reporting
success story
Could e-reporting yield
benefits for CERCLA &
RCRA financial assurance?
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
100%
80%
60%
40%
20%
0%
10000
8000
6000
4000
2000
0
NPDES DMR Compliance in Ohio
FY 2009 - 7/08-6/09
Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun
Reporting Month
% eDMR usage
Permit Violations
Facilities using eDMR
12. E-Manifest
By converting from paper, e-Manifest could reduce burden
by 300,000 - 700,000 hours, with annual savings of ~ $75
million for approximately 160,000 waste handlers.
Region 6 has established a cross check system using data
from Texas’s e-manifest system and EPA permit information
to find out:
(1) Is the facility receiving the hazardous waste permitted to
receive such waste?
(2) Does the receiving facility have the appropriate treatment
methods indicated on their permit associated with the
incoming waste?
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
12
13. 4. Increased transparency
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
13
Evidence that effective
transparency drives performance
SDWA Consumer Confidence
Reports
Restaurant health inspection
grades
SDWA: Mailed report on
compliance resulted in:
Total violations: down 30-44%
Health violations: down 40-57%
*Bennear & Olmstead, Journal of
Environmental Economics and
Management (2008).
14. Leveraging Transparency for Compliance
Example: NY State Sewage Pollution Right-To-Know Act
14
New state law will require POTWs to electronically
report sewage discharges to government and the
public within four hours:
15. 5. Innovative Enforcement
Save EPA resources from CD
implementation and increase
incentives on defendants to
comply with CD
Enhances public transparency
Pilots monitoring and
transparency approaches that
could spread to other venues:
Helps establish these new best
15
practices as basis for incorporating
into regulations and permits
16. Example - Incorporating Next Gen in Settlements
CAA settlement with Shell Deer Park (Texas)
16
Next Gen tools included
in settlement:
◦ Innovative technology to
reduce pollution from
flairs
◦ Enhanced in-plant
monitoring for benzene
◦ Regular tank inspections
with infrared camera
◦ Fence line monitoring for
benzene
◦ Report fence line data on
public web site
17. Example - Incorporating Next Gen in Settlements
CWA Settlement with Metro. Sewer District (St. Louis, Mo.)
Flow monitors on SSO
outfalls
Consent Decree
submissions must be
posted to District website
for three years
Must post discharge
locations to District
website
17
18. Incorporating Next Gen in Settlements – Example
CWA settlement with Roquette America (Iowa)
18
EPA-approved contractor
must complete annual 3rd
party audits for O&M
plan, SWPPP, and
NPDES permits
Reports will identify non-compliance,
steps to
address, and schedule to
correct
Audit reports will be
given to EPA and
Roquette at same time
19. Path Forward
For more information, see the Next Gen Strategic
Plan for FY14-17 at
http://www2.epa.gov/compliance/next-generation-compliance-
strategic-plan-2014-2017
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
19
Editor's Notes
Think about where we were 40 years ago and where we are today, we know we have made incredible progress in last 40 years. What we have done in improving the environment, as Administrator McCarthy put it recently, is one of the great comeback stories ever.
Also know - through our ambient monitoring of air and water, and our inspection and enforcement work, that we have some significant problems left, and that we have sectors where noncompliance is pretty high.
We also know that there is a lot about compliance rates that we don’t know. Because, frankly, our rules aren’t really well designed with ensuring compliance in mind. They are old, mostly. They are complicated, arguably overly so.
The model is largely this. Largely self implementing by regulated sector, where facilities step forward to get a permit, get limits or have to develop a plan of some sort, and then decide on their own how to meet those limits or what should be in that plan; than all their own monitoring and recordkeeping. Typically infrequent end of pipe monitoring, very little ambient monitoring, not much reporting, and what little there is is almost never reported in real time. Not much is available to public. Regulated entities essentially do their thing and wait for an inspector to show up, maybe.
Don’t really know who is in compliance and who isn’t, nor do we or the public know what pollutants are present in the community.
That model isn’t the greatest to start with. Add in that govt resources at state and federal level declining. EPA down 15% in last three years. Might be more depending on what happens at polls today. Model that relies on single facility in person inspections is not sustainable.
But we think advances in technology offer an opportunity to do things differently.
Citizen hand-held sensors coupled with smart phones:
Handheld citizen air Quality Monitor
Digital Environmental Sensors for Temp, Humidity,
Pressure, with GPS
Electrochemical sensors for:
CO 1ppm
NO2 20 ppb
O3 10 ppb
Real time environmental data in public’s hands
Quite a change from once a month data collected by a facility, recorded on a piece of paper, and put in a drawer until an inspector shows up.
Idea of Next Generation Compliance is to use advances in monitoring and IT that make it possible for us to make progress in dealing with pollution without increasing our resources. Technological revolution in last twenty years. High time our environmental protection enterprise took advantage of that.
We know three big things: (1) All kinds of new pollution monitoring tools available, accurate, real-time data. (2) Ability to collect, process, and share information is radically better today than in the past. (3) Transparency is a powerful behavior driver. When you think about addressing pollution through putting those three tools together: advanced monitoring, e-reporting, and transparency – there is potential for transformational change.
Happening all around us in other parts of life.
Simple example. I have two teenage daughters. My family’s cell company continuously monitors our data usage. And we all get a text when we are approaching our limits. They know I know. It changes their behavior. It’s real time data, e-reported, it’s accurate, and its transparent.
Same thing with my wife and my checking account. We don’t balance our checkbook anymore with a hand-written ledger. . We use debit cards, not cash, the bank monitors our usage with every transaction and reports our balance to us on an app on our phones. We both have the app. We both know exactly how much money we have at eveyr moment.
Education.
Food nutritional labeling, in grocery stores and restaraunts.
Design more effective regulations and permits that are easier to implement, and thus result in higher compliance and improved environmental outcomes.Regulations that are easier to understand so the regulated community is clear on what they need to do to comply. Build compliance drivers into rules. Make it easier to comply than not. Examples:
Gas pump nozzles that are physically engineered to only fit certain vehicles (and not in others). Compliance is automatic, and guaranteed.
EPA’s co-proposal for the coal combustion rule (CCR) in 2010 includes, under the Subtitle D option, includes elements to make it more likely that the provisions of this rule will be implemented, like maintaining a web site to make documentation of compliance available to the public, and third party certification re stability of impoundments. These provisions to make more information available to the public and to provide a degree of oversight on facility operations should improve the chances that the protections envisioned in the rule actually happen.
Just as the Internet has transformed the way we communicate and access information, advances in information and emissions/pollution monitoring technology are setting the stage for detection, processing and communications capabilities that can revolutionize environmental protection.Opportunities for companies to avoid noncompliance, save money, be good neighbors. Opportunties for regulators to protect communities and helps focus government on the biggest environmental problems.
Talk about a few of them.
In this example, invisible benzene vapors from a solvent storage tank become “visible” only due to new detection technology that uses equipment that’s about the size of a video camera
New England Regional Laboratory.
Solar-powered buoy takes water quality measurements every 15 minutes. Results are uploaded to a website.
Parameters measured include: temperature, conductivity, pH, dissolved oxygen, turbidity, chlorophyll, and phycocyanin. Phycocyanin measurement used to estimate the level of cyanobacteria, a Harmful Algal Bloom (HAB).
EPA Region 1 owns and maintains the buoy. They actually have two -- the one above and an identical one in the nearby Mystic River.
How data is reported: As part of a complete package, the buoy vendor maintains a web site and database for each customer. The data is reported to a secure web site. EPA sets up a pass code and can provide the pass code to whomever we want to have access to the data.
This is a Geospatial Measurement of Air Pollution (GMAP)
Can be used to estimate amount and location of methane and VOC emissions.
Driver around a facility like a tank farm and see hot spots. On-the spot produce a map of the results, on the rigfht, where red/yellow show emission detections. Screening tool, help identify problems.
“FTIR” stands for Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy, a type of monitor used to measure flare combustion efficiency. “Passive” means there is no emitter telescope. The flare is the “emitter” of an infrared (IR) signal.
This technology is not something that EPA possesses. We used CAA information requests, in the context of case development, negotiations and settlement, to require Marathon, Flint Hills Resources, Shell, and other companies to contract the use of the Passive FTIR to measure emissions of VOCs at their facilities.
Initially there was only one such instrument available from one consultant. There are now other consultants offering this service and its use is becoming widespread. This increased availability has driven down the price of Passive FTIR monitoring so that it is now not that much more costly than conventional stack testing.
The instrument has been tested against other EPA reference methods by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and found to be accurate.
Here’s what happened when this tool was used at two refineries.
In both of these cases, the facilities assumed a 98% combustion efficiency and reported the estimated VOC emissions of 453 and 123 TPY (in BLUE on the chart).
PFTIR monitoring showed that actual emissions (in RED on the chart) were 25 times higher at Marathon and 10 times greater at BP Whiting than the estimates by the companies due to lower actual combustion efficiencies.
As people pay more attention to data, its quality and accuracy tend to improve.Once companies know how their information is shared, compliance increases.
E-reporting would give us more information about the whole universe, and help us to identify / target the biggest problems. Better, more accurate data, with fewer errors introduced through data entry. Provide higher-quality data, faster, to improve accessibility and transparency to the public, so they can more clearly understand the environmental challenges in their own neighborhoods.For example, the graph shows the decrease in permit violations after requiring NPDES permittees to electronically reporting discharge monitoring reports.
As e-DMR reporting usage increased, violations decreased by 50% in the first year after implementation.
Data errors went down from 50,000 to 5,000 per month
As the need for data entry and error checking diminished, Ohio EPA was able to move almost five full-time personnel in to other types of work.
Turbo Tax – example of private sector reporting to government regulator
Non-economic benefits include:
- improved access to higher quality and more timely waste shipment data for regulators;
- nearly real-time shipment tracking capabilities for users;
- more rapid notification and responses to problems or discrepancies encountered with shipments or deliveries;
- greater access for emergency responders about the types and sources of hazardous waste that are in movement;
- one-stop manifest copy submission to EPA and to all interested states through the Exchange Network architecture;
- greater transparency for the public about completed hazardous waste shipments to or from their communities;
- new data management possibilities that could ultimately simplify the RCRA biennial reporting requirements and
consolidate various federal and state reporting requirements for domestic and transboundary shipments.
This is a New York state law which took effect on May 1, 2013.* This law provides, among other things, that “no later than four hours from discovery of the discharge, the [POTW] shall notify the local health department . . . . . [and] the general public . . . .through appropriate electronic media, including, but not limited to, electronic mail or voice communication as determined by the department.” At least one other state has passed similar laws, e.g., Connecticut’s The Public’s Right to Know of a Sewage Spill Act (Public Act 12-11).
* http://www.dec.ny.gov/chemical/90315.html
Second Phase of Sewage Right to Know Act
DEC is developing regulations for the second part of the law that requires publicly owned treatment works and publicly owned sewer systems to directly notify the public of discharges. DEC plans to release the draft regulations this fall for public comment.
To help municipalities implement the law, DEC is seeking a permanent solution that can be universally accessed by elected officials, adjoining municipalities, and the public to receive notification of discharges of untreated and partially treated sewage within 4 hours of discovery.
Remember the Shell Deer Park case that we used as an example of the FLIR camera and mentioned as a user of PFTIR?
Well, not only did R6 and OECA make use of advanced monitoring in the inspection and development of the case. They also incorporated Next Gen tools within the settlement, which was lodged in late 2013, to better drive compliance.
As a result of the settlement, the company will spend at least $100 million on innovative technology to reduce harmful air pollution from industrial flares used to burn waste gases.
In addition, much like in BP, the Shell settlement requires 1) increased frequency of leak detection and measurement, 2) use of PFTIR for measuring flares, 3) use of the FLIR camera as an integral part of self-monitoring to detect leaks, 4) a state-of-the art fence line monitoring system to measure benzene from the refinery and chemical plant, and 5) reporting of fence line data on a public website.
In this CWA settlement, reached in 2011, the St. Louis Sewer District is required to make extensive improvements to its sewer system and treatment plants to eliminate illegal overflows of untreated raw sewage and reduce pollution levels in urban rivers and streams (at an estimated cost of $4.7 billion over 23 years). MSD is also required to invest at least $100 million in an innovative green infrastructure program focused in environmental justice communities in St. Louis.
The Consent Decree requires MSD to post all of its submissions under the CD on the MSD public website for a period of 3 years. Prior Administrative Compliance Orders issued in 2007 and 2008 require MSD to post its discharge locations on its website.
Other examples of enforcement cases with Next Gen components can be found on the Next Gen Intranet Site that you will hear about in just a few minutes.
Next Gen is not just for Air Cases.
Region 7 brought this CWA case against Roquette America for CWA violations at its grain processing facility in Keokuk, Iowa. As a result of a settlement announced in late 2012, the company is required to upgrade its wastewater treatment plant, complete a sewer survey to identify possible discharge locations, undertake sewer improvements, and perform enhanced effluent monitoring.
In addition, Roquette will obtain annual, independent, 3rd-party audits of its compliance with the Consent. Required annual reports will identify non-compliance, along with steps and schedules to address any violations, and will include the 3rd-party audits.
http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/0/645D50E068FF777185257AB50083932A