The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Justice today announced that Hercules Incorporated has agreed to pay a $175,000 penalty to settle alleged violations of federal environmental laws in the processing of cellulose fiber at its Hopewell, Va., plant.

According to the United States’ complaint, Hercules allegedly failed to adequately demonstrate compliance with the national emission standard for hazardous air pollutants (NESHAPs) for cellulose products manufacturing and violated related regulations on leak detection and repair.

Cellulose fiber is the main raw material used in the manufacturing processes conducted at the facility, located at 1111 Hercules Road. The cellulose is treated with various chemicals, and gaseous and particulate by-products are vented and treated by air pollution control devices. However, leakage of hazardous air pollutants into the environment can occur at different points along the manufacturing process, for example, at valves and vents.

Under a consent decree that was lodged with the U.S. District Court in Richmond, Va. on July 2, 2012, Hercules is required to comply with the Clean Air Act standard of “maximum achievable control technology” (MACT) . This standard protects public health and improves air quality by requiring facilities to use state-of-the-art technology for reducing hazardous air pollutants. Hercules will spend approximately $200,000 on the consent decree requirements, resulting in an estimated 150 tons of hazardous air pollutants reduced per year. As part of the settlement, Hercules has agreed to conduct additional testing, update its operating permit to document testing and monitoring activities, and engage in a two-year enhanced leak detection and repair program. The proposed settlement is subject to a 30-day public comment period and court approval.

This agreement is part of an EPA national initiative to target and reduce illegal emissions of air toxics and reduce excess emissions for facilities that have a significant impact on air quality and health in residential areas. Industrial and commercial facilities are required to implement leak detection and repair programs to prevent the escape of hazardous air pollutants.

Company Fails to Properly Report Chemical Storage & Useage

A chemical producer faces an EPA fine of $93,900 for failing to report the use and storage of hazardous chemicals at its Fairfield, Conn. facility, in violation of the federal right-to-know law.

According to a recent EPA complaint, the company, 5N Plus, Inc., violated the Emergency Planning and Community Right to Know Act (EPCRA) by failing to report hazardous chemical inventory information, known as Tier II reports, to the fire department, and the local and state emergency responders. The company also failed to report the use and potential release of lead and selenium to the state and federal Toxic Release Inventory, a national database of toxic chemical use available to the public.

During a June 2011 inspection of the facility, EPA determined that 5N Plus had failed to follow the reporting requirements by failing to include gallium trichloride (an extremely hazardous substance) in its inventory of hazardous chemicals for 2010, and by failing to submit Tier II reports for reporting years 2008 and 2009 for chlorine gas, lead and gallium trichloride.  Following further review, EPA also determined that the company had failed to submit accurate Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) reports for lead in 2008 and 2009, and for selenium in 2010.

After the two inspections, a release of chlorine gas at the facility resulted in area-wide evacuations and worker exposure to chlorine gas. Subsequent to the release, the company moved its gallium trichloride manufacture to another facility.

The proposed penalty includes $40,500 for failure to file Tier II forms for 2008, 2009 and 2010 and $53,400 for failure to file TRI forms for reporting years 2008, 2009 and 2010.

How do you prevent that from happening to you?

The first step in preventing unwanted enforcement action and penalties is to fully understand what chemicals are on-site, what physical states that they are present in, how much you have and how they are used and stored at your facility. The next critical step is understanding what laws and regulations are applicable to these hazardous chemicals. Many of the USEPA regulations are triggered by the type and amount of chemical used and/or stored at a facility.

It is also almost impossible to prepare emergency response plans and procedures without understanding what is present at your facility and how it might impact human health and the environment if it were accidently released.

 Did you Know?

Safetec can help you get the answers you need. Ask us about our chemical inventory services, our chemical compliance management and other products and services that can assist you in achieving compliance not only with EPCRA, but also with many OSHA and EPA regulations.

 Summary of USEPA Action

On July 3, 2012, EPA amended the Emergency and Hazardous Chemical Inventory Forms under Section 312 of the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (EPCRA) to add new data elements and revise some existing data elements. The amendments are intended to meet the purpose of EPCRA, which is “…to encourage and support state and local planning for emergencies caused by the release of hazardous chemicals and to provide citizens and governments with information concerning potential chemical hazards present in their communities.”

The revisions:

•     respond to stakeholder requests, EPA is proposing to add new data elements to the Tier I and Tier II forms in an effort to make the forms more useful for state, local, and tribal agencies;

•     make reporting easier for facilities;

•     are intended to provide clarity in reporting while maintaining protection of human health and the environment; and

•     may impose minimal reporting burden on facilities since the data elements proposed are readily available to the facility. Revising the existing data elements will make the forms more user-friendly and ease reporting requirements for facilities.

Organizations and facilities subject to section 312 of EPCRA and its implementing regulations found in 40 CFR 370 may be affected by this rule.

(http://www.epa.gov/oem/content/epcra/index.htm#prop)

According to information found in the Federal Register Vol. 77, No. 135 dated July 13, 2012 the following information must now be reported on the Tier II report:

• Latitude & Longitude
• TRI Identification Number of reporting Tier II facility
• Location of hazardous chemicals storage & whether or not the storage area is manned or unmanned
• Maximum number of occupants that may be present at the facility at any one time
• Contact information of the facility emergency coordinator, Tier I & II contact information, and email addresses of the owner/operator,  and emergency contacts
• Facilities must provide emergency coordinator contact information for facilities subject to EPCRA 302
• Additionally, for facilities subject to EPCRA 302 AND CAA 112(r) – RMP, page one of the revised Tier II inventory form must include the table of range codes & amounts for reporting maximum amount and daily average amounts.
• The form will add separate data fields for reporting pure chemical and mixtures in the chemical reporting section of the Tier II inventory form
• Facilities must provide a description for the storage types and conditions (instead of using reporting codes)
• The Tier II inventory form will be revised so that facilities can report additional State or local reporting requirements or to voluntarily report hazardous chemicals that are present below the reporting thresholds

• Rule goes into effect January 1, 2014
• Facilities should take note and make sure that during CY2013 that they collect the necessary information so that they can properly prepare information that must be included on the new Tier II report which will be due March 1, 2014

Need Help or More Information?

Safetec is here to help with its tools,  products and services. Safetec can assist you in automating your Tier II reporting process, but we are also experts in several areas of chemical management with respect to EHS concerns. Ask us about our chemical compliance management system, our on-site inventory services, GHS and HazCom Compliance Services and (M)SDS retrieval services. We have folks that are ready and available to assist you. Contact us today!

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In an attempt to settle the debate between OSHA critics and advocates, the Harvard Business School conducted a study to evaluate the impact of workplace safety inspection, basing their analysis on random inspections conducted by California OSHA. Their findings were slightly surprising. Not only did OSHA have a positive impact on worker safety, but they also saved companies in the way of medical expenses, lost wages, and lower injury rates—without the expense of employment, credit ratings, firm survival or sales.

To read the Harvard Business School article about the study, entitled “OSHA Inspections:  Protecting Employees or Killing Jobs?”, follow this link.

If you would like to view the actual study, click here.

The federal USEPA Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) Report under EPCRA Section 313 (commonly referred to as “Form R”) are normally due on July 1 of each calendar year. However, since July 1 falls on a Sunday this year, the USEPA will accept Reporting Year (RY) 2011 TRI forms that are posted and/or postmarked by Monday, July 2, by 11:59:59 PM Eastern Time.

What’s New for RY 2011?

According to the USEPA there are a few changes for RY 2011. They are as follows:

-Addition of national Toxicology Program (NTP) Carcinogens to the TRI Chemical list. There are a total of 16 new chemicals on this list that are required to be included on the RY 2011 submission. For a copy of the full list, refer to the RY 2011 reporting instructions published by the USEPA

-Certain questions on the Form R report have changed to reflect the TRI Information Collection Request that was approved in October 2011. In particular, Sections 5.1, 5.3, 6.1, 6.2, 8.10, 8.11 and 9.1 have been changed

-On October 17, 2011 the USEPA lifted the administrative stay for TRI reporting of hydrogen sulfide. Facilities that manufacture, process or otherwise use hydrogen sulfide need to track usage during calendar year 2012 and report it on their Form R submission for RY 2012 (which is due on July 1, 2013).

-USEPA will only accept TRI-Meweb or paper submissions for RY 2011 and the USEPA is strongly encouraging everyone to use the electronic system. The USEPA will no longer except submissions on CD ROM.

Surviving Form R Reporting

Form R is one of the more difficult reports to prepare and if you haven’t started yet, you still have enough time to get it done.  Here are some things to consider to increase your odds of successfully surviving Form R reporting season:

-Are any of the chemicals you use at your facility on the USEPA EPCRA 313 list? – be sure to check all of your mixtures, formulations, and by-products, as the list is CAS number based.

If you do, you need to determine how the SARA 313 chemical is used at your facility because you will need to check it against the Form R reporting definitions of: “manufactured,” “processed,” and “otherwise used” categories. These three categories have specific thresholds that determine if reporting is necessary.

-Do any of your EPCRA 313 chemicals have special reporting requirements such as lower thresholds or certain chemical qualifiers?

If so, you need to make sure that you take special care in your threshold determination calculations.

-Do you have copies of your annual air emissions report, NPDES reporting, hazardous waste manifests, recycling records and other documentation that may help you determine what chemicals were released to the environment?

-Do you have a CDX account with the USEPA so that you can file electronically?

Helpful Resources

The USEPA actually has several tools that can assist you this year as you go through your Form R calculation. Here are some tools that I have found to be particularly helpful:

Basic Training: http://www.epa.gov/tri/training/RY11/EPA_RY11_Basic/index.html

Advanced Training: http://www.epa.gov/tri/training/RY11/EPA_RY11_Advanced/index.html

Guidance: http://www.epa.gov/tri/guide_docs/index.htm

TRI Threshold Screening Tool: http://www.epa.gov/tri/threshold/index.htm

Reporting Instructions & Forms: http://www.epa.gov/tri/report/index.htm

Don’t be Afraid to Ask for Help!

When in doubt, reach out to an expert for help.  Safetec is here to help you manage your chemicals and to provide you with tools that will assist you in determining what materials you have at your location that are potentially subject to EPCRA 313 reporting. We also have EHS Professional Services if you need a consultant to help you with getting your report competed on time. Contact us today to find out how we can best serve you.

What Happened?

Mid-America Pipeline Company, LLC (MAPCO), and Enterprise Products Operating LLC (Enterprise), of Houston, Texas, have agreed to pay a civil penalty of more than $1 million to the United States to settle violations of the federal Clean Water Act related to three natural gasoline pipeline spills in Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska.

MAPCO owns and Enterprise operates the 2,769-mile West Red Pipeline, which transports mixed natural gasoline products between Conway, Kan., and Pine Bend, Minn. The settlement resolves Clean Water Act violations related to three spills that occurred along the pipeline:

• A March 29, 2007, rupture near Yutan, NE which caused the discharge of approximately 1,669 barrels of natural gasoline directly into an unnamed ditch and Otoe Creek.
• An April 23, 2010, rupture near Niles, KS, which caused the discharge of approximately 1,760 barrels of natural gasoline directly into an unnamed ditch, Cole Creek, Buckeye Creek and the  Solomon River.
• An August 13, 2011, rupture near Onawa, IA, which caused the discharge of approximately 818 barrels of natural gasoline directly into the Missouri River.

“More than 20,000 miles of pipeline, carrying oil and petroleum products, cross the states of Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska in EPA’s Region 7,” EPA Regional Administrator Karl Brooks said. “A frequent cause of pipeline breaks is the action of third parties during farming and excavation. This settlement requires the defendants to honor a schedule of pipeline inspections on the ground and from the air, and reach out to local agencies, contractors and excavators to make sure they are more fully aware of pipeline locations and depths.”

“This settlement requires proactive vigilance to ensure that our soil and waterways are protected from contaminants,” said Deborah R. Gilg, U.S. Attorney for the District of Nebraska. “The agreement will result in safer pipeline operations and that will be good for Nebraska’s environment.”

In addition to the proactive inspections and outreach efforts, the settlement also requires MAPCO and Enterprise to spend $200,000 to relocate, cover, lower or replace pipeline segments; install new remote shutoff valves; install new physical protections such as fences or concrete barriers; and install other new equipment, structures or systems to prevent spills from reaching navigable waters.

 What Can We Learn From This?

The USEPA takes spills and releases to the environment seriously and companies would do well to prevent these kinds of steep penalties and injunctive relief costs by evaluating their own procedures on how their employees should respond when an environmental spill or release occurs and evaluate steps that can be taken to proactively prevent such incidents from ever occuring.

There is only a short window of time to react to an emergency situation, so it is imperative that a company have the correct tools and resources to deal with a chemical release to the environment.

If you feel you need help in this area, there are several resources available to you. Safetec has a chemical compliance management system that can assist you with managing various risks associated with the use and storage of hazardous chemicals, including a “spill calcualtor tool” which automates reportable quantity calculations.

Additionally, Safetec has professional EHS staff that can work with your team on a one-to-one basis to help you desgin, implement and maintain an effective progr

If you would like to read the Portland Business Journal article on Dave Bundy, click here. 

For more about the Portland Business Journal’s 2012 CFO of the Year Awards (including a full list of winners & honorees), you can access it here.

Most EHS folks are well aware that for years OSHA has listed its Hazard Communication Standard (HazCom) in its top 10 most violated standards. But what you may not have known that penalties associated with non-compliance of OSHA standards relating to chemicals (i.e. process safety management, PPE, respiratory protection, flammable and combustible materials) in conjunction with penalties associated to the HazCom standard resulted in over $10.1 million dollars of fines made payable to Uncle Sam for just the manufacturing, transportation and service sectors alone.  So, what are some proactive measure that companies can take to avoid such costly penalties? There are several, but here are 5 tips that seem to work universally well for many employers.

5 Tips for Success

1. Take Inventory

Most facilities have an inventory process so that they know what to order, how much to order and when to order. However, for purposes of EHS compliance, chemical inventory activities take on a whole new meaning. You are looking to determine not only what you have and how much, but also you need answers to the following questions, as well as many more, as a result of your inventory:

Do you have an (m)SDS for it?

Is it labeled properly?

How frequently is it used? Who Uses it? How do they apply it?

Have the physical and health hazards been addressed?

Is it an extremely hazardous substance? Is it a carcinogen? Does it trigger OSHA’s process safety management requirements?

Where is it stored currently? Is it being stored properly? Is it compatible with the materials it is currently stored with?

2. Review the (m)SDS before the chemical is used on the floor

You know that you need an (m)SDS for each new chemical, or any time there are significant changes to a current chemical that is being used, but do you have a process in place that allows you to actually assess the potential EHS risks of the chemical before bringing it on-site? For example, will the chemical cause you to exceed your air permit limits because there are HAPs in the material? Will it require special handling instructions? Does it require new PPE? Many times employers do not find out the answers to these questions until there has been some sort of EHS incident on the work floor.

3. Make your training specific to your operations

You have an entire library of training videos that new hires are required to watch and a set that are required for annual refresher training. However, research tells us that in order for adult learners to truly understand the material, they need to put into practice. OSHA frequently cites employers on failure to properly train their employees. In other words, employers often go through the motions so that they can check the box to show that training has been completed.

You should design your training programs so that it incorporates job specific and/or industry specific information into the training itself. You may want to include photos of workers at your facility who are wearing their proper PPE or bring in several different containers that you found out on the shop floor that have both proper and improper labels to show workers the difference. It is these types of hands on exercises that will drive your point home and keep folks safe.

4. Make it easy for your employees to do the right thing

In today’s modern society, people frequently lament that they are “just crazy busy!” Our employees are no execption to the modern day time crunch. They are being asked to do more with less due to employee cut backs and tighter profit margins. The temptation to cut corners is often very great. Therefore, when you are putting together your compliance programs, make it easy for your employees to do the right thing. For example, utilize technology to automate various reports such as near miss events, recordables, root cause analysis and reporting unsafe acts. Additionally, to make sure that containers are properly labeled, you may want to create posters or binders that show examples and photos of what a properly labeled drum looks like, paint lines that clearly designate safe walkways, establish an (m)SDS compliance committee to ensure that the most up to date physical and health hazard information is available for your chemicals. The bottom line is to make it convenient for your employees to exhibit the behaviour necessary to stay safe.

5. Form an inter-departmental EHS steering committee

It has often been said that the mother of innovation is necessity… but what happens when several different groups in an organization need lots of different things? What happens when something is desperately needed, but does not appear that it will benefit the bottom line or have a significant return on investment? In these situations, it is extremely helpful to have one committee that has a representative from each department, such as accounting, purchasing, sales, operations, R&D, quality, and EHS. This type of group can then tackle problems and come up with both short term and long term solutions that will benefit the entire company. If purchasing understands that by spending a few dollars on a product that will be more effective on the machine, will produce higher quality products that are easier to sell and have a low VOC content with zero carcinogens in the formulation, this is a profitable strategy for the company!

Sometimes Everyone Needs a Little Help

Often it is difficult to take on a new project, even when you know that it will be extremely beneficial because there are no extra resources to take on such a project and handle all of the day-to-day fires. This is when calling in the help of a consultant that understands how to handle real-world situations can be very valuable. Additionally, converting manual tasks into automated tasks through the use of technology can free up loads of time to tackle more interesting projects.

Safetec can help you accomplish your EHS goals. Contact us today for more information.

IRIS – Overview

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) today announced that the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) will conduct a comprehensive review of the agency’s Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) program’s assessment development process. The IRIS program helps EPA protect Americans’ health and the environment by conducting health assessments of over 550 chemicals that may be present in our environment.

In April 2011, NAS recommended several ways to improve the development of IRIS assessments. EPA has embraced these recommendations and is implementing them using a phased approach. Future draft IRIS assessments released for public comment and peer review will demonstrate the progress EPA has made in implementing NAS recommendations.

“EPA is committed to a strong and robust IRIS program,” said Lek Kadeli, acting assistant administrator for the EPA’s Office of Research and Development. “This program plays a significant role in protecting the health of our country’s citizens and the environment in which they live. We welcome the NAS’ review of the IRIS assessment development process and look forward to working with them to continue to strengthen the program.”

NAS will conduct a review of the IRIS assessment development process and the changes that are currently being made or planned by EPA in response to NAS’ April 2011 recommendations. NAS will also review current methods for weight of evidence analyses and recommend approaches for weighing scientific evidence for chemical hazard identification.

What Does This Mean??

The information from the IRIS system will be used in various EPA rulemaking and policy changes. In other words, depending on the hazards of the chemicals associated with risk to human health (exposure from air, water and/or waste releases into the environment through the use and disposal of these chemicals), the EPA may lower threshold determinations, add certain chemicals to the USEPA List of Lists or establish new rules for these chemicals. The USPEA has stated that the release of final IRIS assessments is consistent with EPA’s ongoing efforts to improve Americans’ health and protect the environment.

Want More Information?

Safetec is committed to providing its customers with the most accurate information regarding chemicals in the workplace and our environment. Contact us today about how to effectively manage risks associated with chemical usage, storage and disposal.

More information about IRIS: http://www.epa.gov/iris