Major Proposal Completes EPA Rules for Land Disposal of Wastes: Final third of regulations deals with some of toughest hazardous waste streams, sets deadlines for their treatment; target for law is May 1990

The Environmental Protection Agency is finishing up its work on one of the major provisions of the 1984 amendments to the Resource Conservation & Recovery Act (RCRA), which prohibits land disposal of waste that might cause harm to human health or the environment. That provision has resulted in an enormous volume of regulations, specifying treatment standards for more than 450 hazardous wastes, all to be in place by the statutory deadline of May 1990. The final, and most complicated, of these regulations was proposed last month. Called the third rules (because the mandated list of chemicals was roughly divided into thirds for the purpose of writing the regulations), they tackle some of the most difficult hazardous waste streams of the entire law. In addition, the rules set deadlines for treatment of wastes that were previously given extensions for lack of treatment capacity under the first two thirds of the regulations. EPA calculates that the proposal ...