Hazardous Waste Incinerators

GAO/RCED-95-17, Hazardous Waste Incinerators: EPA's and OSHA's Actions to Better Protect Health and Safety Not Complete. In 1990, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) became concerned about workers' safety at hazardous waste incinerators because of the possibility that waste handling operations could pose a significant health threat to employees. As a result, EPA requested assistance from and established a joint task force with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to evaluate compliance with relevant health and safety requirements at hazardous waste incinerators. The task force's 1991 report summarized the results of inspections at 29 such facilities and made five recommendations to EPA and four to OSHA.1 These recommendations were intended as follow-through measures to correct violations detected during the inspections, educate the combustion industry, improve the coverage of inspections, educate compliance officials, and prompt EPA to conduct research and revise incinerators' permits as necessary. In response to your request for information on whether hazardous waste incineration facilities are following federal health and safety requirements, we determined (1) what the status of the task force report's recommendations is, (2) what the results of subsequent inspections and enforcement actions at the 29 facilities have been, and (3) whether EPA or OSHA have taken other actions beyond those recommended by the task force to better protect health and safety at hazardous waste incineration facilities. EPA and/or OSHA have fully implemented three of the task force's recommendations: EPA and OSHA have followed up on violations found during the task force's inspections, EPA and OSHA have educated the combustion industry, and EPA has taken additional steps to educate compliance officials. EPA has not fully implemented other recommendations to (1) improve the coverage of EPA's inspections and (2) conduct research on the use of certain operating equipment and revise incineration facilities' permits, as necessary, to limit the use of this equipment. OSHA has not fully implemented the recommendations that it (1) educate compliance officials and (2) improve the coverage of its inspections. Subsequent to the task force's inspections, EPA and the states inspected the facilities but did not detect the same pattern of violations. OSHA did not schedule further inspections for these facilities because the agency judges the relative health and safety risk of working at incineration facilities to be lower than the risk of working in other types of industries. Therefore, OSHA has assigned incinerators a low priority for inspections. EPA and OSHA have taken several actions beyond those recommended by the task force to protect health and safety at incineration facilities. However, one of these actions-OSHA's plan to require facilities to have accredited training programs for workers who handle hazardous waste-may not achieve its intended result because OSHA does not have a viable plan to ensure that all hazardous waste facilities submit their programs for accreditation.