January/February 2017

PE Report
Hazardous Waste Rule Requires PEs to Certify Building Designs

Professional engineers now play a greater role in the safety of hazardous waste containment buildings, under a revised federal rule that requires them to certify that the buildings meet specified design standards. The rulemaking builds upon NSPE’s advocacy efforts to expand the PE’s role on federal projects involving the practice of engineering.

The Environmental Protection Agency issued the rulemaking for the hazardous waste generator regulator program to address ambiguities, inconsistencies, gaps, and lack of flexibility to better protect human health and the environment. The changes to the regulations are intended to enhance the safety of facilities that create hazardous waste and the response capabilities of emergency responders with risk communication improvements.

When the EPA released the proposed rules for public comment in September 2015, the agency received more than 200 responses, which included comments from NSPE, state and local governments, the generating industry, the hazardous waste management industry, academia, the energy sector, and retailers.

The revised rule on hazardous waste generator improvements has several objectives:

• Reorganizing the hazardous waste generator regulations to make them more user-friendly and thus improve their usability by the regulated community;

• Providing a better understanding of how the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act hazardous waste generator regulatory program works;

• Addressing gaps in the existing regulations to strengthen environmental protection; providing greater flexibility for hazardous waste generators to manage their waste in a cost-effective and protective manner;

• Making technical corrections and changes to address inadvertent errors in the regulations; and

• Updating the emergency response and contingency planning for provisions for both small- and large-quantity generators to include local emergency planning committees among the emergency planning organizations that a generator may establish and organize response arrangements.

In NSPE Position Statement 1767, the Society advocates that federal employees, who by federal statute may be exempt from state engineering licensure laws, but who are in responsible charge of engineering activities as defined in the National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying’s Model Law, should be required by federal agency policy to be licensed professional engineers in at least one jurisdiction.