EPA has drafted a rule on leather work gloves as hazardous waste, regional head says

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has drafted rules to clarify whether the leather work gloves worn across Alaska's oil fields and mines must be managed as hazardous waste, EPA Region 10 Administrator Emma Pokon said Nov. 5.

Pokon told a Resource Development Council and Alaska Miners Association breakfast forum in Anchorage that she learned a couple of weeks earlier the package was with the Office of Management and Budget. The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs' public list of rules under executive-order review showed no EPA hazardous-waste rule as of Monday. It has not been released for public comment, and Pokon did not describe what it would require.

The Alaska Miners Association's executive director said members of both groups had raised concerns about the requirement under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act to treat leather gloves as hazardous waste.

Pokon said the issue first reached her when she was Alaska's environmental conservation commissioner, after enforcement actions surprised oil and gas operators and mines. She repeated a line from a recent EPA roundtable: "we have employees that are wearing these for 8+ hours a day and then you tell us that they're hazardous. There's some tension in there."

Since joining EPA, Pokon said, she has learned that some states running the federal program do not classify the gloves as hazardous waste. Because state programs must legally be at least as stringent as the federal one, she said, that variation "suggests at a minimum there's some gray area." After her office raised the issue with EPA headquarters, she said, "now suddenly there's like a regs package that's been drafted and is waiting to get out for public comment."

EPA guidance on hazardous waste identification says gloves and protective clothing may be regulated when they contain hazardous waste or show its characteristics. The Alaska Oil & Gas Association, commenting on the state's program authorization, said leather can contain chromium from tanning. It asked the state to issue guidance that used leather not be classified as hazardous because of trivalent chromium unless it is visibly contaminated with another hazardous substance.

Alaska took over the federal hazardous waste program on Aug. 6 after EPA approved its application. The Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation now handles permitting, inspections, compliance and enforcement.

Pokon said the roundtable also looked at how the program works in Alaska, including storage limits. Under the state's rules, large-quantity generators generally can hold hazardous waste for 90 days and small-quantity generators for 270 days. Pokon said those limits can be hard to meet for communities and some industries off the road system, and participants said barge space sometimes must be planned two years out. She called the roundtable fact-gathering and said there were "no final determinations."