In a very significant case, the Chief Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) for U.S. EPA imposed a $2.5 million dollar penalty against a manufacturer, Elementis Chromium, Inc. ("Elementis") for failing to submit a health study to EPA pursuant to the requirements of TSCA. The EPA imposed the large penalty despite the fact,
On January 7th, Scott Nally resigned as Director of Ohio EPA after a three year stint. Local media coverage of his resignations raised questions regarding the abrupt and surprise announcement. Speculation included the fact that it was tied to the Nally’s firing of long-time Division of Surface Water Chief George Elmaraghy earlier this year. This
If you settle with the State EPA in your jurisdiction and perform a cleanup under State regulatory statutes, can you recover costs from prior a owner and/or operator?
This is an issue that federal courts are grappling with in the aftermath of the U.S Supreme Court Ruling in Cooper Industries, Inc. v. Aviall Services,
An article in the Akron Beacon Journal discusses a study by Kent State University regarding the disposal of flow back water from natural gas fracking in deep wells in Ohio. Flow back water is the water that comes back up from fracking a natural gas well. The flow back water is considered wastewater.
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Through out the long and contentious election process the focus of the debate was getting America back to work. Much of the debate centered on tax policy and budget cuts. However, the President was accused of "over-regulation" which Mitt Romney argued cooled the economic recovery.
As part of the debate over regulation, environmental regulation was
Owners of small business form corporations, in part, to insulate themselves from personal liability. A recent trend in Ohio is that the State has become far more aggressive in pursuing owners of small businesses personally in environmental enforcement actions.
A business owner could still be pursued even if the corporate formalities were followed. More and
In June 2012, Ohio EPA issued an Early Stakeholder Outreach for Beneficial Use of Industrial Byproducts. This is the Agency’s second attempt at developing a comprehensive regulatory scheme for reuse of industrial materials such as fly ash, bottom ash, foundry sand, slag and other materials.
From 1994 until the early 2000’s, Ohio EPA regulated these materials
Typically, environmental legislation may be passed in Ohio once every few years. In fact, most environmental regulatory reform is done in small doses during the budget bill process. In the last two weeks, Governor Kasich has signed into law three separate bills that including major environmental regulatory provisions.
In two prior posts, I discussed the recent Ohio EPA rule change to its asbestos rules. As discussed previously, Ohio EPA added a single sentence to definition of "friable asbestos" appearing in Ohio Administrative Code Rule 3745-20-01. The sentence states:
Any category I or category II asbestos containing material that becomes damaged from either deterioration
On April 17th, EPA issued new rules designed to reduce air emissions from oil & gas operations, including wells drilling using hydraulic fracturing ("fracking"). The new federal standards (New Source Performance Standards -NSPS) are seen as the first significant new federal regulation governing fracking.
Some may wonder how gas wells generate air emissions. When