User:Blue.Slip16/Industrial waste

(There's already information about RCRA in the article, that's why I'm not going into specifics about it here. Also I'm not sure if any of this falls under close paraphrasing since I got this information from the EPA website and the info there is very to-the-point and I wasn't sure how to put it into my own words without resembling their wording.)

RCRA regulates industrial, along with household and manufacturing, hazardous and solid wastes. RCRA aims to conserve natural resources and energy, protect human health, eliminate or reduce waste, and to clean up waste when needed.

The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) first began as an amendment to the Solid Waste Disposal Act of 1965.

In 1984, Congress passed the Hazardous and Solid Waste Amendments (HSWA) which strengthened RCRA by:


 * Eliminating land disposal (I'm not entirely sure if this wikilink would work here)—land disposal means placing waste on or in land (e.g. injection wells, landfills, etc.), and the Land Disposal Restrictions (LDR) program (under HSWA) forbids untreated hazardous waste from land disposals, and requires the EPA to set specific treatment standards that must be met before hazardous waste can be subject to land disposals. The LDR program also has a dilution prohibition, which asserts that hazardous waste cannot be diluted down by the handler as a means to avoid satisfying the treatment.
 * Waste minimization—the goal of waste minimization is to make sure that the amount of hazardous waste that is produced, and its toxicity levels, is as diminished as possible, and the EPA does this through source reduction and recycling. Source reduction (or pollution prevention (P2)) trims production of hazardous wastes right at its source, and is the EPA's first step in material management with recycling being second.
 * Amplifying the EPA's authority regarding corrective action—corrective action is when treatment, storage, and disposal facilities (TSDFs) must oblige with inquiring hazardous releases into ground and surface water, soil, and air, and clearing it up. Under the HSWA, the EPA can necessitate corrective action at permitted and non-permitted TSDFs.

The EPA uses Superfund to find sites of contamination, identify the parties responsible, and in the occurrences where said parties are not known or able to, the program funds cleanups. Superfund also works on figuring out and applying final remedies for cleanups. The Superfund process is to: 1) collect necessary information (known as the Remedial Investigation (RI) phase); 2) assess alternatives to deal with any potential risks to the environmental and human health (known as the Feasibility Study (FS) stage); 3) determine the most suitable remedies that could lower the risks to more adequate levels. Some sites are so contaminated because of past waste disposals that it takes decades to clean them up, or bring the contamination down to acceptable levels, thus requiring long-term management over those sites. Hence, sometimes figuring out a final remedy is not possible, and so, the EPA has developed the Adaptive Management plan.