Do You Know About the United States Environmental Protection Agency's Small Business Compliance Policy?

The federal Small Business Compliance Policy  promotes environmental compliance among small businesses (those with 100 or fewer employees) by providing incentives to discover and correct environmental problems. The USEPA will eliminate or significantly reduce penalties for small businesses that voluntarily discover violations of environmental law and promptly disclose and correct them. This Policy implements section 223 of the Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act of 1996.  More information including frequently asked questions can be found at: http://www.epa.gov/compliance/incentives/smallbusiness/index.html.

USEPA Releases Agency Plans for Adapting to a Changing Climate

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) released its draft Climate Change Adaptation Implementation Plans for public review and comment. The Implementation Plans provide detailed information about the actions EPA plans to take across the country to help communities adapt to a changing climate.

The impacts of a changing climate - including increased extreme weather, floods, and droughts - affect EPA's work to protect clean air and water. The draft Climate Change Adaptation Implementation Plans recognize that EPA must integrate climate adaptation planning into its programs, policies, rules, and operations to ensure that the agency's work continues to be effective even as the climate changes.

In 2009, all federal agencies were required to develop Climate Change Adaptation Plans by the federal Interagency Climate Change Adaptation Task Force. Under Executive Order 13514, the Task Force was charged with developing recommendations for the President on how to increase the nation's resilience to climate change. The new Implementation Plans provide information about how EPA will meet the agency-wide priorities identified in the draft Climate Adaptation Plan released earlier this year.

The comment period on EPA's draft Climate Change Adaptation Implementation Plans closes on January 3, 2014.

More information on EPA's Climate Change Adaptation Implementation Plans: http://epa.gov/climatechange/impacts-adaptation/fed-programs/EPA-impl-plans.html

OSHA Launches New Online Toolkit

While many chemicals are suspected of being harmful, OSHA's exposure standards are out-of-date and inadequately protective for the small number of chemicals that are regulated in the workplace. The first resource OSHA has created is a toolkit to identify safer chemicals that can be used in place of more hazardous ones. This toolkit walks employers and workers step-by-step through information, methods, tools and guidance to either eliminate hazardous chemicals or make informed substitution decisions in the workplace by finding a safer chemical, material, product or process. The toolkit is available at http://www.osha.gov/dsg/safer_chemicals/index.html.

"We know that the most efficient and effective way to protect workers from hazardous chemicals is by eliminating or replacing those chemicals with safer alternatives whenever possible," said Dr. David Michaels, assistant secretary of labor for occupational safety and health.

OSHA also created another new web resource: the Annotated Permissible Exposure Limits, or annotated PEL tables, which will enable employers to voluntarily adopt newer, more protective workplace exposure limits. OSHA's PELs set mandatory limits on the amount or concentration of a substance in the air to protect workers against the health effects of certain hazardous chemicals; and OSHA will continue to enforce those mandatory PELs. Since OSHA's adoption of the majority of its PELs more than 40 years ago, new scientific data, industrial experience and developments in technology clearly indicate that in many instances these mandatory limits are not sufficiently protective of workers' health.

The annotated PEL tables provide a side-by-side comparison of OSHA PELs for general industry to the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health PELs, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health recommended exposure limits, and American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienist threshold limit values. They offer an easily accessible reference source for up-to-date workplace exposure limits, which are available at http://www.osha.gov/dsg/annotated-pels/index.html.