On Campus

36 � Division of Chemical Hea

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Enlibra, strategy, blah, blah, blah

1 According to the 2001 Biennial Report, BasicChemical Manufacturing and Petroleum &Coal Products Manufacturing generatedapproximately 21,700,000 tons of hazardouswaste. RCRA regulations allow generators tomanage containers without regulation if theycontain less than 0.3% of their mass, or 65,100tons in the case of Basic Chemical Manufactur-ing and Petroleum & Coal Products Manufac-turing. Higher Education does not appear onthe sector-specific list in the 2001 BiennialReport, so generated less than 29,339 tons,using the same criteria for reporting. Quod EratDemonstrandum.

B efore he left for the Department ofHealth & Human Services, formerEPA Administrator, the Honorable

Mike Leavitt, aspired for collaborative partner-ships with the regulated community. Hewanted his agency to strive for balancebetween risk and benefit—a concept he called‘‘enlibra.’’ There yet remains evidence that EPAretains this philosophy.

Higher education should welcome this. Formore than 20 years, institutions of higher learn-ing have been struggling to comply with reg-ulations made with others in mind. Everysector, it seems, complains that the rules area bad fit for them, especially the hazardouswaste rules. The regulated community seemsto think that ‘‘one size fits none.’’ For morethan a decade, organizations and groups havebeen taking their turn at bat, hoping to getenough runners in scoring position that theEPA agrees.

For a few years now, higher education hasdutifully gone along with EPA’s ‘‘sector stra-tegies’’ program. This effort has at its heart thenotion that trade associations work with EPAand see real action, in terms of regulatorychange, creation of tools to measure sectorenvironmental impact, and effort towardscreating Environmental Management Sys-tems.

Business school calls strategy a ‘‘game planfor winning.’’ It usually requires that everyonebe heading for the same goal. What is ironicabout EPA’s Sector Strategies program is that itbears no resemblance to strategy. It is a cutealliteration that appears to come down to oneoffice (that of Policy, Economics, and Innova-tion) trying to stave off enforcement typeswhile helping policy types see the value oftargeted regulatory change. This is like pittingthe batting, pitching and fielding coachesagainst each other—some strategy.

Space requires that we focus on regulatoryreform. This May, the EPA released its draftrule for higher education laboratory wastemanagement. In the preamble and the rulesthemselves, EPA makes some appalling mis-takes and some warranted admissions. EPAcontends that laboratory waste is nine percentof the total waste from higher education; wethink more like 70–90%. We chemists have aword for ‘‘off by an order of magnitude.’’ It is‘‘WRONG.’’ EPA includes the R enantiomer ofepinephrine in its list of ‘‘reactive acute hazar-dous wastes.’’ This is probably because the

lth and Safety of the American Chemical Society

ed.

alpha sort of the P-list rightly puts the ‘‘(R)-’’at the end, and policy-makers picked it up as anindication of the ‘‘reactive’’ tag. Other namesfor P042 did not get the nod, though. As alwaysin chemistry, spelling counts. As proposed, theregulations exclude probably half the targetorganizations – conditionally exempt smallquantity generators – and are sufficiently unap-pealing to others that adoption will probably bescarce. What a win!

Further, EPA goes so far as to disparage thepeople working in higher education, both inlaboratories and in support roles. EPA states,on one hand, that higher education makes ascant minority of the nation’s hazardous waste(agreed) and that EPA needs a ‘‘safeguard’’ inits lab cleanout provisions to ensure thatschools do not seek lower levels of regulation.The proposal all but does away with theinfamous P-list, which creates a perverse incen-tive among smaller schools to retain inven-tories of those materials, because disposalcauses a shift in generator status. EPAacknowledges that by-passing the generatorstatus shift is a good thing, but refuses to allowit to occur more than once a year per lab.Because they need a ‘‘safeguard.’’ From a sectorthat generates less than half the waste thatchemical manufacturing and petrochemicalrefining can legally exempt from regulation?1

And this is the effort that took 16 years todevelop, after EPA acknowledged in 1989that higher education is a horse of a differentcolor? There is no balance of risk and benefithere. There is no strategy here. This is aclumsy, unappealing, and half-hearted effort.It does little to make up for decades of policyneglect and abuse by coercive regulators benton finding fault regardless of the risk/benefitbalance.

1871-5532/$32.00

doi:10.1016/j.jchas.2006.09.003