By Siobhan Hughes
Dow Jones Newswires
WASHINGTON -(Dow Jones)- The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s chief challenged criticism that a pending coal-waste proposal would damage the building-materials industry, saying Thursday that the waste produced by coal-fired power plants may be safely recycled into products such as cement.
“There seems to be genuine agreement that the use of coal ash in concrete and concrete-like products does not cause a threat to human health and the environment,” EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said in remarks to the Woman’s National Democratic Club. “The threats associated with coal-ash waste are from leaching,” she said, “which is not a problem from a concrete perspective.”
The Obama administration is walking a fine line as it seeks to regulate coal ash after a December 2008 spill from a Tennessee Valley Authority facility sent about a billion gallons of ash and water over as many as 300 acres. That raised public health fears, since coal ash contains arsenic, selenium, and other contaminants that can be damaging. The EPA found elevated levels of metals such as arsenic after the spill, though it said that municipal drinking water was safe.
Companies such as LaFarge SA (LG), the world’s biggest cement maker, have gone to the White House to warn that regulating coal-waste as a hazardous material would create a stigma around reusing the waste for other purposes, even if the EPA decides to exempt coal ash when it is recycled into other products. More than 40% of coal waste is recycled, added to products such as cement and drywall, a practice known as “beneficial reuse.” The rest is disposed of in landfills or retention ponds.
The White House has held weekly meetings on the subject, a review that has delayed release of the EPA proposal, which was supposed to happen by December. The issue has also prompted lobbying by the American Coal Ash Association, which has lined up support in Congress and warned against “events in Washington” that threaten “the very survival of a multibillion dollar industry.”
“There has been a lot of hullabaloo over coal ash, and I’m disappointed that some of the folks, especially on the industry side, haven’t taken the time to wait and let us try to craft rulemaking,” Jackson said. “I think we agree that coal ash can be reused–in fact we would love to incentivize the reuse of coal.”
She didn’t say whether coal waste could be safely used in other products, such as drywall, or added to the soil as “fill” material.
The EPA is trying to find a middle ground between business and environmentalists. If the EPA decides to treat coal ash as a hazardous waste, it would lead to the first nationwide standards and could potentially force power plants to shift to landfills instead of holding ponds. Retention ponds are considered riskier by environmentalists because of the chances that the waste can ooze out into water supplies.
Environmentalists for years had pressed the EPA to do more, saying that leaving regulation up to states would put the public at risk. In 2000, the Clinton administration’s EPA decided against treating the sludge produced by generators and electric utilities as hazardous. It said that characterizing coal waste as a hazardous material might stigmatize the “beneficial reuse” of the waste. The EPA also said that states had been improving their regulations of the disposal of waste.
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