Government▼Watch EPA won’t control ballast water discharges officials rests on the argument that USCG’s programs are more likely than water quality permits to curb invasions. The chief programs are the voluntary ballast water exchange guidelines, which were promulgated in 1996 under the National Invasive Species Act, and new discharge standards under review. PHOTODISC
The U.S. EPA will not regulate ballast water discharges from oceangoing ships, the Bush Administration announced September 9, rejecting a petition from 15 environmental groups (Fed. Regist. 2003, 68, 53,165–53,166). Ballast water, the source of 72% of alien species invading the Great Lakes, should remain under the regulatory watch of the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG), according to the EPA announcement. The coalition of groups that are demanding a more stringent approach to controlling invasive species petitioned EPA in 1999 to require ships to obtain permits for ballast discharges under the Clean Water Act (CWA), says Linda Sheehan, director of the Pacific Region of the Ocean Conservancy. Current USCG guidelines to exchange ballast water at sea aren’t working, Sheehan says, because they aren’t mandatory and because ballast water exchange doesn’t remove all the invasive species. The denial of the petition by EPA
Environmentalists want ships to obtain Clean Water Act permits.
The USCG announced on September 26 (Fed. Regist. 2003, 68, 55,559) that agency staff will be preparing a Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) on two potential ballast water treatment standards based on a score of technologies,
including some that haven’t been proven. One standard under review would require the removal of all organisms larger than 0.1 micrometers, and the other would set maximum discharge concentrations for fish, algae, insects, and other groups of organisms. Comments on the proposed scope of the PEIS will be accepted until December 26. Although officials with state and provincial agencies in the Great Lakes basin say they were disappointed by EPA’s decision, that disappointment is tempered by hopes for passage in 2004 of a proposal being debated in Congress, known as the National Aquatic Invasive Species Act (S. 525 and H.R. 5395), says Dennis Schornack, chair of the U.S. section of the International Joint Commission, a U.S.–Canadian watchdog for the Great Lakes. The legislation would provide $841 million over five years and put USCG in charge of enforcing a discharge standard. Environmental group spokespersons say the bill would help curb discharges, but they still support CWA permits. —JANET PELLEY
EPA halts tracking hazardous waste from Mexico The U.S. EPA has eliminated funding for Haztraks, a database that tracks hazardous waste shipped from Mexico into the United States. The loss of Haztraks is a serious strike against right-to-know efforts and a significant step backward for some international agreements, academics and environmental officials say. From 1995 to 2002, Haztraks reported on the amount and kinds of hazardous waste, such as heavy metals and solvents, shipped into the United States from maquiladoras, or foreign-owned manufacturing plants in Mexico, most of which have U.S. owners. It also noted where the waste was treated or disposed, says Marc Mowrey, hazardous waste coordinator at EPA’s Region 9. Under both Mexican law and the
binational 1983 La Paz agreement, waste generated by the 3200 maquiladoras in Mexico must be shipped back to the country where the legal owner is based. Now that Haztraks is defunct, state agencies will still collect waste manifests for each shipment, but the information will be harder to analyze, Mowrey says. Mexican laws require some reporting, but the laws are frequently ignored by companies and not enforced by the government. Data are not submitted or stored electronically; permission to view the data is tough to obtain. EPA operated Haztraks with its own staff and contract workers who were paid $250,000 per year, Mowrey says. Beginning on October 1, the budget for contract work for waste management at
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EPA Region 9 was cut to $1.4 million, less than half of the $3 million approved for 2000. “We had to make choices about what got funded, and Haztraks didn’t stand up to other essential functions,” he said. Maquiladoras generate roughly 98% of all the hazardous waste produced along the border, which speaks to the interest of U.S. federal authorities in keeping track of it, says Kathryn Kopinak, a sociologist at King’s University College at the University of Western Ontario. Officials implementing Border 2012, a cleanup plan sponsored by the United States and Mexico (Environ. Sci. Technol. 2003, 37, 212A), will now have a hard time making commitments, Mowrey adds. —JANET PELLEY
© 2003 American Chemical Society
