The Usual Suspects – U.S. EPA 2011 – 2013 Enforcement Initiatives

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (U.S. EPA) has announced its 2011 through 2013 National Enforcement Initiatives to handle national environmental and public health problems. For air pollution, the initiatives include addressing air pollution from the usual suspects: the largest sources of particulate matter, nitrogen oxides, and sulfur dioxide.  This includes continued recent enforcement actions on coal-fired utilities and cement, glass, and acid production facilities.  U.S. EPA will also be targeting to protect the health of communities from toxic air pollution resulting from excess emissions through enforcement of existing MACT rules and with a new enforcement initiative for excess emissions from startup, shutdown, and malfunction events.  U.S. EPA has recently announced a number of enforcement settlements that are directly in line with these announced priorities.  ALL4 expects increased enforcement actions by U.S. EPA to target many previously identified New Source Review (NSR) permitting violations and events where it determines that excess toxic emissions resulted from non-routine operations.  In addition to the air pollution initiatives directed towards large sources and excess emissions of hazardous air pollutants, U.S. EPA also announced enforcement initiatives that target stormwater and raw sewage discharges, groundwater contamination by confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs), multi-media discharges from mineral processing operations, and multi-media impacts associated with resource extraction operations.  A summary of U.S. EPA’s enforcement goals can be viewed here.