Greenversations

By Aaron Ferster

I’ve been working—and commuting—in Washington, DC since 1996 when I moved to the area from the Bronx for a job writing interpretive signs at the National Zoo.

My wife and I lived just behind the back entrance to the park. It was a five-minute ride to work, but 15-minutes home because of the big hill standing between my office and our apartment. If the traffic light at the bottom of our street was green, I could make it in without a single pedal stroke.

At that time, the notion of partaking in official “Bike to Work Day” festivities seemed almost comical. “It would take me longer to get to the event than it would to actually ride to work,” I bragged. Then a colleague told me about the t-shirts and free coffee.

I’ve been hooked ever since.

Apparently I’m not alone. According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s latest American Community Survey (ACS), the number of Americans who use a bicycle as their primary means of getting to work is up 14 percent since 2007, 36 percent from 2005, and 43 percent since 2000.

That’s all great news for EPA, an organization with a mission to protect human health and the environment. More bike commuting means less air pollution, cleaner skies, and healthier people.

Now that both my place of employment (EPA) and home (the suburbs) are farther apart, coasting to work is no longer an option. But I still fit riding into my commute as often as possible, and Bike to Work Day—which happens on May 20 this year—remains one of my favorite events of the year.

If you’ve been thinking of giving bike commuting a try, Bike to Work Day is a great opportunity. There are always plenty of other riders to draft behind or chat with, and there’s even free coffee and snacks at the end of the ride. Here in DC, local cycling organizations have set up “commuter convoys” from all directions to make it easy to find the best route.

Will you be riding to work on May 20? Why or why not? Use the comments section below to share your thoughts about your own plans and experiences.

About the author: Aaron Ferster is a science writer in EPA’s Office of Research and Development and the editor of Science Wednesday. Follow his progress as he rides in next Friday morning via EPA’s twitter account: @EPAgov.

Editor’s Note: The opinions expressed in Greenversations are those of the author. They do not reflect EPA policy, endorsement, or action, and EPA does not verify the accuracy or science of the contents of the blog.

Are you interested in playing a role in setting priorities with EPA? Do you have an interest in the compliance and enforcement of environmental laws? I’d like to tell you about an exciting opportunity to share your feedback with EPA on the environmental problems that are most important to you.

EPA is in the process of selecting new priorities to focus our enforcement and compliance work in 2011-2013. As part of this process, we would like to collect a wide range of views from the public on the most important environmental problems that occur nationwide. It would also be helpful if you could share a little bit about the reasons why you think that a particular problem is significant from your perspective. For example, if you considered any particular pieces of information, such as news articles, or reports about environmental issues, please send us information about those sources of information as well.

Our decisions regarding future priorities will consider the following key questions:

• Is the environmental problem happening nationwide or only in an isolated area?
• Does the environmental problem offer an opportunity for EPA, rather than a state, to play a major role in environmental protection?
• Does the environmental problem happen frequently because the source emitting the pollution is not following the requirements of environmental laws and regulations?

Here’s how to get started:

• Learn more about EPA’s enforcement and compliance work, our existing 2008-2010 priorities, and how we selected these priorities as focus areas, and
• Visit our discussion forum to submit your feedback by September 30.

About the Author: Elizabeth Walsh joined the US Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, DC in 2001. She currently works on setting national priorities with EPA’s enforcement and compliance assurance program and analyzing environmental data to help EPA set long-term environmental goals.

On July 2, 2009, Administrator Lisa Jackson asked me, as the head of EPA’s enforcement and compliance program, to examine our water enforcement program in light of information showing that water quality goals are not being met and that there are too many violations in too many places. She asked me to report back in ninety days with recommendations to improve transparency, strengthen clean water enforcement performance, and expand our use of technology to increase efficiency and to provide useful information to the public. Our recommended action plan needs to improve compliance and address the problems that are having the biggest impact on water quality.

To help us achieve the Administrator’s goals, we invite you to share your ideas through our discussion forum. The blog can be found at http://blog.epa.gov/cwaactionplan Your ideas will be considered for recommendations to the EPA Administrator about the future direction for EPA’s water enforcement program. In all our discussions, EPA will be mindful of the need to focus on the most important work for protecting water quality and improving compliance with the Clean Water Act, given resource constraints that require us to place a premium on innovation and efficiency.

About the author: Cynthia Giles is Assistant Administrator of EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance.

About the author: Karen Reshkin manages the Web site in EPA’s Chicago office. She’s been there since 1991, and can still remember life before the Internet.

A few weeks ago, I declared that I’d try to diminish my ignorance about some of the things EPA does. Turns out it’s hard to write about things you don’t know! I hope you’ll bear with me if some of this seems a bit elementary. I want to understand better how enforcement works at EPA, so I’ll start with laws and regulations.

EPA is charged with implementing federal environmental laws such as the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. Statutes like these are passed by Congress and signed into law by the President. They may get amended, as happened with the Clean Water Act in 1972, 1977, 1981…

Those laws look quite, um, legal to me. Why would you need regulations on top of that? Turns out the statutes usually don’t contain the details you’d need to actually enforce them (e.g. allowable concentrations of particular substances in water). EPA is a regulatory agency, which means Congress has authorized it to write regulations that explain how to implement a statute. There’s a whole process for doing that, and it generally includes an opportunity for the public to comment on a proposed rule (regulation).

The Web provides an excellent way for people to get involved in rulemaking. You can view the proposed rule online and provide comments online as well. (More traditional methods like paper mail still work, too.) The collection of documents related to a rulemaking is called a docket and it includes public comments, background reports, Federal Register notices, and other supporting documents. Dockets are accessible to the public and Regulations.gov serves as EPA’s electronic public docket and online comment system.

This didn’t really bring us to enforcement yet, but I’m getting there.

About the author: Joshua Secunda is the Innovations Coordinator and a Senior Enforcement Counsel with EPA’s Boston office.

Earlier this year, our Region and the U.S. Veteran’s Administration (VA) won an Environmental Business Journal’s 2007 Achievement Award for the creation of innovative pollution prevention and compliance tracking software. The software will perform tasks that cannot be achieved by software systems currently on the market. The VA committed to spend a minimum of $500,000 to design and implement the Supplemental Environmental Project (SEP). Actual costs may reach a million dollars.

In 2003, the Region inspected the VA campus in White River Junction, Vermont. While there, our inspectors discovered potentially explosive hazardous waste on-site. The lab building was evacuated, and the containers removed and detonated. The explosive power of the wastes equaled several sticks of dynamite. Numerous other RCRA (hazardous waste) violations were found.

Although the Region’s Federal Facility program had provided hands-on compliance assistance and lead multimedia inspections since 1994, the VA remained in chronic noncompliance. This puzzled us. Apparently, enforcement actions succeeded in getting the VA’s attention.

Nonetheless, enforcement alone didn’t measurably improve their performance. We decided to use this enforcement action to identify basic causes of the VA’s environmental difficulties, and formulate solutions that might be implemented through a SEP. A SEP is an environmentally beneficial project that a violator voluntarily undertakes as part of an enforcement action settlement.

The best way to do that was in collaboration with the VA itself. We concluded that the VA’s outdated and inaccurate chemical and waste tracking systems were a key contributor to their problems. Due to these inadequate systems, the VA didn’t know where its hazardous materials or wastes were located, their quantities, or whether chemicals were being double or triple ordered.

Working with White River Junction VA personnel, we identified the critical tasks that a computerized “cradle to grave” management system would have to perform: automatically notify on-line chemical purchasers of non-toxic substitutes; reduce the total amount of hazardous products purchased through a chemical “adoption” inventory system; maintain an inventory of hazardous products and wastes and where they are stored; and provide access to a MSDS electronic library.

To achieve these capabilities, a new software system would have to be designed. Ultimately, the VA agreed to create this innovative system and test it at all eleven New England VA hospitals. If successful, the VA hopes to implement it nationwide. The VA is the largest health care organization in the world. Thus, the SEP’s ultimate environmental impact could be significant.

Elements of this story are worth noting. The costs to EPA of achieving environmental improvement go up steadily, while the resources to achieve them shrink. Thus, while litigating, we should simultaneously explore collaborative strategies that identify solutions to institutional environmental problems, and pose solutions to them. EPA has multiple tools to achieve compliance in addition to enforcement. Leveraging enforcement actions to address root causes of chronic noncompliance is an additional tool. Designing SEPs that focus on a sector’s systemic environmental problems should be a central goal of our work.

Suggested Links:

- EPA Region 1 Healthcare Sector Assistance

- Press Release on this settlement