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Frequent Questions
1. What is Subpart K?
Subpart K is a new subpart that EPA has added to the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) hazardous waste generator regulatory requirements. Its formal name is, “Alternative Requirements for Hazardous Waste Determination and Accumulation of Unwanted Material for Laboratories Owned by Eligible Academic Entities.” This alternative set of regulations is specifically tailored to hazardous waste generation patterns in academic laboratories. It allows flexibility regarding where, at the eligible academic entity, the hazardous waste determination may be made, provided certain provisions are met that are designed to protect human health and the environment.
2. Who is an eligible academic entity?
As defined in this rule, eligible academic entities are colleges and universities, teaching hospitals that are either owned by or formally affiliated with colleges and universities, and non-profit research institutes that are either owned by or formally affiliated with colleges and universities.
3. Who is an eligible academic entity and why is this different from the proposal?
The proposed rule limited the scope of entities allowed to operate their laboratories under this rule to colleges and universities that are classified as Large Quantity Generators (LQGs) and Small Quantity Generators (SQGs) because EPA had more information about their challenges with RCRA hazardous waste generator regulations. By soliciting comment on whether to expand the scope of the rule, EPA learned a great deal about other types of academic institutions that operate similarly and face the same hazardous waste management challenges as laboratories at colleges and universities. Based on comments and EPA’s own research of laboratory hazardous waste generation patterns and the presence of students at various laboratories, EPA expanded the scope of the final rule. Specifically, the final rule allows LQG, SQG, and Conditionally Exempt Small Quantity Generator (CESQG) colleges and universities, and teaching hospitals and non-profit research institutes that are either owned by or formally affiliated with a college or university to operate under this new rule (Subpart K).
4. What are large quantity generators (LQG), small quantity generators (SQG) and conditionally exempt small quantity generators (CESQGs)?EPA has identified three categories of generators based on the amounts and types of hazardous waste each generates and the degree of risk each presents to the environment:
Large Quantity Generators (LQG) produce 1,000 kilograms per month or more of hazardous waste, or more than 1 kilogram per month of acutely hazardous waste. Requirements for LQGs include:
- LQGs may only accumulate waste on site for 90 days. Certain exceptions apply.
- LQGs do not have a limit on the amount of hazardous waste accumulated on site.
- There must always be at least one employee available to respond to an emergency. This employee is the emergency coordinator responsible for coordinating all emergency response measures. LQGs must have detailed, written contingency plans for handling emergencies.
- LQGs must submit a biennial hazardous waste report.
Small Quantity Generators (SQG) generate more than 100 kilograms, but less than 1,000 kilograms of hazardous waste, and less than 1 kilogram of acutely hazardous waste per month. Requirements for SQGs include:
- SQGs may accumulate hazardous waste on site for 180 days without a permit (or 270 days if shipping a distance greater than 200 miles).
- The quantity of hazardous on site waste must never exceed 6,000 kilograms.
- There must always be at least one employee available to respond to an emergency. This employee is the emergency coordinator responsible for coordinating all emergency response measures. SQGs are not required to have detailed, written contingency plans.
Conditionally Exempt Small Quantity Generators (CESQGs) generate less than 100 kilograms of hazardous waste and less than 1 kilogram of acutely hazardous waste per month. Requirements for CESQGs include:
- CESQGs must identify all the hazardous waste generated.
- CESQGs may not accumulate more than 1,000 kilograms of hazardous waste at any time.
- CESQGs must ensure that hazardous waste is delivered to a person or facility who is authorized to manage it, such as a municipal solid waste landfill, a hazardous waste treatment, storage or disposal facility (TSDF), or a universal waste facility.
For the proposal, EPA believed that CESQGs would not want to participate in Subpart K because many of the provisions of Subpart K are more stringent than those to which they are currently subject. For example, CESQGs are currently not subject to the controls that apply to satellite accumulation areas and do not have to comply with the additional requirements applicable to LQGs and SQGs. However, commenters indicated that by allowing CESQGs to operate under this new set of regulations, EPA would be facilitating the creation of institution-wide hazardous waste management plans and systems at eligible academic entities.
6. What is the definition of laboratory for Subpart K?
This rule defines laboratory as:
An area owned by an eligible academic entity where relatively small quantities of chemicals and other substances are used on a non-production basis for teaching or research (or diagnostic purposes at a teaching hospital) and are stored and used in containers that are easily manipulated by one person. Photo laboratories, art studios, and field laboratories are considered laboratories. Areas such as chemical stockrooms and preparatory laboratories that provide a support function to teaching or research laboratories (or diagnostic laboratories at teaching hospitals) are also considered laboratories.EPA borrowed terminology from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s laboratory standard (see 29 CFR 191.1450) in order to be consistent with the practices and terminology used in laboratories today.
7. What are the environmental benefits of this final rule?
Subpart K protects public health and the environment by creating generator requirements better suited to the specific circumstances of teaching and research laboratories. The provisions of the rule will result in safer management of laboratory hazardous wastes. Subpart K requires that the hazardous waste determinations be made by trained personnel, instead of by untrained students. Additionally, Subpart K promotes the protection of safer waste management practices by ensuring that all unwanted materials, which may, in whole or in part, be RCRA hazardous wastes, are safely managed while in the laboratory prior to the time that the hazardous waste determination is made. In addition, the requirement in Subpart K to develop and implement a laboratory management plan (LMP) will improve an eligible academic entity’s coordination and integration of hazardous waste management procedures. It will also enhance environmental awareness among researchers and students leading to a transfer of good environmental management practices to the larger community. Furthermore, providing incentives for voluntary laboratory clean-outs will facilitate the removal and proper management of outdated or unstable chemicals in academic laboratory chemical inventories, leading to safer laboratory environments and enhanced environmental protection.
8. How does this rule help academic entities dispose of their hazardous waste?
The rule helps eligible academic entities safely manage their hazardous laboratory waste by providing them flexibility to make the hazardous waste determination either: 1) in the laboratory, before the hazardous waste is removed and destined for the central accumulation area (CAA); 2) at an on-site CAA; or 3) at an on-site treatment, storage or disposal facility (TSDF). Previously, the hazardous waste determination was frequently made by individual researchers or students. This action is designed to ensure that persons, properly and thoroughly trained in the RCRA hazardous waste regulations, are making such determinations for all wastes generated at the laboratory. EPA believe that this change will reduce the chances of improper or hazardous waste determinations and, thus, the possibility of hazardous wastes being improperly managed. The rule also will allow environmental health and safety personnel at the eligible academic entities to determine - campus-wide or facility-wide - whether any of the chemicals or other materials generated in one laboratory may continue to be used in another laboratory. This provides an opportunity to reduce the amount of waste, whether hazardous or not, that is generated in the first place.
9. How do academic labs differ from industrial hazardous waste generators?Relative to industrial production facilities, academic laboratories generally have a large number of points of generation (i.e., points where waste is originally generated), such as multiple laboratory benchtops within a single laboratory and laboratories located in multiple buildings on a single campus. In addition, an eligible academic entity may have many EPA ID numbers for the different laboratories on its campus. Academic laboratories also tend to generate a relatively small volume of each hazardous waste and many different wastestreams at each of these points of generation. In contrast, industrial generators tend to generate only a few wastestreams in large quantities at relatively few generation points. Additionally, while most individuals involved in hazardous waste generation activities are employees who are professionally trained in managing hazardous wastes as part of their job, those who generally generate hazardous waste at laboratories at eligible academic entities are students who do not possess the same level of training. Another contrast between these entities is the transient nature of students in academic laboratory settings and the relative stability of employees in a commercial production or other non-academic laboratory.
10. What are "unwanted materials"?
“Unwanted materials” are defined in this rule as, “any chemical, mixtures of chemicals, products of experiments, or other material from a laboratory that are no longer needed, wanted, or usable in the laboratory and that are destined for hazardous waste determination by a trained professional. Unwanted materials includes reactive acutely hazardous unwanted materials and materials that may eventually be determined not to be a solid or a hazardous waste.”
11. What are performance-based standards?Performance-based standards provide facilities with flexibility to choose the appropriate manner in which to manage their hazardous wastes in order to meet the requirements of the regulations. Subpart K was developed with performance-based standards in part to account for the diversity among eligible academic entities’ operations and practices. This diversity in programs for managing wastes, including hazardous wastes, is also reflective of logistical considerations including campus size, space, personnel, and other resource differences among eligible academic entities.
12. What must an eligible academic entity do to comply with this rule?Once an eligible academic entity notifies the appropriate State Director or EPA Regional Director that it is opting into this rule, it must manage the unwanted materials generated in its laboratory in accordance with the standards set out in this rule for container management, container labeling, and personnel training. The laboratories must also remove their unwanted materials within the defined limits (either on a regular interval not to exceed six months or on a rolling basis so that no container of unwanted material is in the laboratory longer than 6 months; or when 55 gallons of unwanted materials, or one quart of reactive acutely hazardous unwanted material has been accumulated, whichever occurs first). Eligible academic entities must also follow the recordkeeping requirements described in the rule. Additionally, an eligible academic entity must develop, implement, and retain a Laboratory Management Plan (LMP) describing in detail how the laboratories at the eligible academic entity plan to meet these performance-based requirements.
13. What is the laboratory management plan and what does it include?Each eligible academic entity is required to develop a laboratory management plan (LMP) to describe how it will meet the performance-based standards of this rule. The LMP is divided into two parts and must address nine required elements. Part I of the LMP contains two elements necessary for implementers and inspectors. The contents of Part I of the LMP are enforceable. The seven elements in Part II of the LMP must be reasonably addressed; however the specifics of the elements in this part are not enforceable. In fact, EPA envisions Part II of the LMP to be an opportunity for eligible academic entities to develop best management practices for their institutions, further increasing protection of human health and the environment.
14. Is this rule mandatory for all eligible academic entities?EPA recognizes that hazardous waste management operations vary widely among campuses and some eligible academic entities have developed programs that have proven to be successful and may be reluctant to change to a new set of rules. Therefore, Subpart K is an optional, alternative set of requirements to the existing generator regulations for LQGs, SQGs, and CESQGs. Those eligible academic entities that choose to continue to manage their laboratory hazardous wastes under the pre-existing hazardous waste generator regulations may do so. Those eligible academic entities that would like the additional flexibility of Subpart K may choose to manage their laboratory hazardous wastes according to this new set of regulations. EPA does not intend for eligible academic entities to make this decision on a laboratory-by-laboratory basis. All laboratories covered under a single EPA ID number at an eligible academic entity must operate under the same set of regulations.
15. When will Subpart K be implemented?
Subpart K will be implemented at various times. For those states that are not authorized for the RCRA program, the rule is effective 30 days after FR publication. However, EPA authorizes qualified states to administer their own hazardous waste programs, in lieu of the federal program. As a result, new federal requirements such as Subpart K do not take effect in an authorized state until the state adopts the federal requirements as state law. Since Subpart K is not more stringent than the pre-existing regulations, authorized states are not required to modify their program to adopt regulations consistent with Subpart K.
16. What incentives for voluntary laboratory clean-outs are in this rule?The frequency with which a laboratory can take advantage of the incentives for laboratory cleanouts is limited to once per 12-month period per laboratory. There are two incentives for conducting a laboratory cleanout:
- During a laboratory cleanout, laboratories have an increased amount of time that unwanted materials may remain in the laboratory (30 days); and
- Laboratories are not required to count hazardous wastes that are unused commercial chemical products (i.e., P- and U- listed hazardous wastes and unused characteristic hazardous wastes) generated during the designated laboratory clean-out period towards their generator status.
17. Why is EPA planning to publish a Federal Register Notice of Data Availability on government research laboratories?
As explained in the “who is eligible question” above, EPA researched other types of institutions besides colleges and universities that exhibited similar hazardous waste generation patterns. From our own research and public comments received on the proposed rule, EPA determined that government research laboratories have the same hazardous waste generation pattern seen at colleges and universities of generating small amounts of many different hazardous wastes that vary over time at many points of generation. However, because a significant student presence in the laboratories increases the challenges of making the hazardous waste determination and training, an inherently transient student population is an equally important rationale behind this rule. While the public comments the Agency received provided some information about students in government research laboratories, information about students at most other government research laboratories was not readily available. Thus, EPA plans to publish a Federal Register Notice of Data Availability on government research laboratories to collect information on student population and hazardous waste generation patterns.
