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Bannockburn, Ill. — After a decade of lobbying by IPC — Association Connecting Electronics Industries, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has released a new ruling on the definition of solid waste, under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) hazardous waste regulations, which could save U.S. printed-circuit-board (PCB) manufacturers millions of dollars as well as encourage recycling.
Signed on October 7, 2008, the EPA's new definition of solid waste (DSW) rule removes regulatory barriers that inhibited recycling of manufacturing wastes, known also as secondary materials. The new ruling will go into effect 60 days after it is published in the Federal Register.
The issue was that the EPA was regulating manufacturing waste, or secondary materials, as hazardous materials even though the materials were being recycled, explained Fern Abrams, director of government relations and environmental policy at IPC.
"The problem with that is the EPA, rightly so under RCRA, has a host of very prescriptive regulations about how hazardous waste is to be handled. The gist of RCRA is to prevent materials from being dumped, buried or disposed of improperly and to make sure hazardous waste is properly treated and disposed of so it's a very prescriptive and costly set of regulations to safeguard the nation's environment," Abrams said.
"It all makes perfect sense but the problem is when you take materials that are going to be recycled and treat them as hazardous waste and put all these prescriptive requirements on them, it ends up being very costly to be recycled, and, in fact, so costly it's cheaper to dispose of the materials and mine virgin ones, which is not at all the intention," said Abrams.
"It's one of those laws with unintended consequences," she added.
In addition, the hazardous materials could only be treated, stored and disposed of at RCRA permitted treatment, storage and disposal facilities.
The result, over the years, has been that manufacturers have either paid more for recycling because they felt it was the right thing to do, or they disposed of the material as RCRA hazardous waste because it was too costly to recycle.
As a direct result of IPC lobbying efforts, in the final rule, the DSW was revised to exclude secondary materials from the RCRA hazardous waste regulations if they're recycled according to specific requirements. These requirements call for the generating facility to provide proper documentation of shipments of secondary materials and to answer a series of questions in order to ensure proper recycling of secondary materials.
Now, under the new rule, manufacturers will be able to recycle their manufacturing waste not as hazardous waste but as secondary material. PCB manufacturers will benefit the most from this new ruling because they create a huge volume of manufacturing waste material, called sludge, that contains anywhere from 10 percent to 40 percent copper, said Abrams. "This was a huge amount of valuable material that was often getting landfilled."
In earlier drafts of the DSW rule, secondary materials would be exempt from RCRA hazardous waste regulations only if the secondary material was recycled at a generation site. IPC says the recycling of copper from wastewater sludge exemplifies why off-site recycling is critical for the electronics industry to benefit from the new rule; sludge is recycled at smelting facilities, not at PCB manufacturing facilities.
"Under this rule, it will create more opportunities for recycling, and lower the cost of recycling, making companies more receptive to recycling," Abrams said.
Another change that IPC lobbied for, and is now contained in the new rule, allows for middlemen, or brokers, to aggregate amounts of secondary materials without becoming RCRA treatment, storage and disposal facilities (TSDFs) because small and medium-sized businesses do not produce enough secondary materials to deal directly with a smelting facility. By allowing a middleman to aggregate small amounts of secondary materials, small and medium-sized businesses can take advantage of the rule's exclusion and recycle their secondary materials outside of RCRA hazardous waste regulations, said IPC.
In addition, the final DSW rule allows for ordinary business records to be used as appropriate forms of record-keeping for shipping secondary materials. This allows records that are already produced to be used instead of requiring new additional ones.
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