Your Guide to Emerging Issues in Environmental Regulation and Litigation.
Earlier this month, chemical maker DuPont agreed to a $27 million settlement to resolve the Hoosick Falls class action, which involved allegations of perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) contamination of the upstate New York village’s water supply. In February 2016, class action, Baker, et al. v. E.I. DuPont de Nemours & Co., et al, was filed in … Continued
Do you want to destroy PFAS? But why stop there? Continue on to convert them into high value fluorochemicals, and recover and reuse the phosphate salts. That’s what one new study claims it can do. The authors reacted PFAS with potassium phosphate salts under solvent-free mechanochemical conditions — a mineralization process enabling fluorine recovery as KF … Continued
The EPA on July 2 issued a finalized interim rule, published six days later in the Federal Register, which delays implementation of certain National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants (NESHAP) requirements for coke oven manufacturing facilities. According to the EPA, hazardous air pollutants (HAP) emitted from these coke oven manufacturing facilities can include benzene, … Continued
Extended Producer Responsibility Legislation, also known as EPR laws, is a policy-based approach that holds producers accountable for the entire lifecycle of their products, particularly for take-back, recycling, and final disposal. Although various other countries have implemented EPR legislation as early as the 1990s, its adoption in the U.S. has been considerably slow, fragmented, and … Continued
Last month, the New York State Assembly demurred from taking up a vote for the second time on the Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act (“PRRIA”). The PRRIA was designed to cause a restructuring of the life cycle of packaging within the state by fundamentally shifting the burden of handling packaging waste from municipalities and … Continued
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced June 25 that she is directing New York Power Authority to add at least one gigawatt of new nuclear power generation by building a zero-emission nuclear power plant somewhere in upstate New York. This announcement, four years after the 2021 closure of the Indian Point nuclear plant due to … Continued
The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) applies to a major federal action that significantly affects the quality of the human environment. On June 30, several federal agencies took their own federal action which will likely have significant impacts in how NEPA is implemented in the future. In particular, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Department of … Continued
Influenced by laws in existence in multiple states, including California, Colorado, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, Oregon, and Washington, the New York State Legislature has examined in recent years extended producer responsibility (EPR) legislation intended to hold producers accountable for managing their packaging at the end of life. The Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act … Continued
On June 18, the U.S. Supreme Court issued two decisions that clarify a deceptively simple question under the Clean Air Act: Where should lawsuits challenging EPA actions be filed? The rulings – EPA v. Calumet Shreveport Refining LLC and Oklahoma et al. v. EPA – do not change the substance of environmental law, but they do shape … Continued
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that agencies preparing an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) under the guidance of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) need only to consider the environmental effects of the “project at hand” and not those that are “separate in time and place.” The 8-0 decision handed down May 29 in Seven Cnty. … Continued