WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Friday set the first national standards for waste generated from coal burned for electricity, treating it more like household garbage rather than hazardous material.
Environmentalists had pushed for the hazardous classification, citing the hundreds of cases nationwide in which coal ash waste had tainted waterways or underground aquifers. A hazardous classification would have put the federal government in charge of enforcement, which has been uneven across states that have varying degrees of regulation.
The coal industry wanted the less stringent classification, arguing that coal ash wasn’t dangerous and that a hazardous label would hinder recycling. About 40 percent of coal ash is reused.
Classifying coal ash as solid waste leaves it up to citizens and states to ensure standards are met.
“The regulatory uncertainty that has impeded the beneficial use of coal ash for half a decade has finally come to an end,” said Thomas H. Adams, executive director of the American Coal Ash Association. “EPA’s final decision to regulate coal ash as a ‘non-hazardous’ material puts science ahead of politics and clears the way for beneficial use of ash to begin growing again — thereby keeping ash out of landfills and disposal ponds in the first place.”
The Environmental Protection Agency said in a call with reporters Friday that the record did not support a hazardous classification. The agency said that the steps it was taking would protect communities from the risks associated with coal ash waste sites and hold the companies operating them accountable.
“It does what we hoped to accomplish … in a very aggressive but reasonable and pragmatic way,” said EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy.
The Obama administration was under court order to unveil the rule Friday, ending a six-year effort that began after a massive spill at a Tennessee power plant in 2008. Since then, the EPA has documented 132 cases in which coal-fired power plant waste damaged rivers, streams and lakes, and 123 where it has tainted underground water sources, in many cases legally.
In volume, coal ash ranks behind only household trash in quantity, and it is expected to grow as the EPA controls pollutants like heat-trapping carbon dioxide and mercury and other toxic air pollutants from the nation’s coal fleet. On the upside, a switch from coal to natural gas-fired power plants in recent years has generated less ash.
The rules will boost monitoring for leaks, control blowing dust and require companies to make testing results public. They also set standards for closing waste sites and require those that are structurally deficient or tainting waterways to close.
The new rules also would apply to closed coal ash ponds at sites where utilities have active operations, such as the Duke Energy plant in Eden, N.C., where the sudden collapse of a drainage pipe triggered a massive spill in February that coated 70 miles of the Dan River in gray sludge.
But the regulations do not cover sites at shuttered power plants. In some cases, they would allow existing landfills that do not meet the new standards to continue to operate.
