Ross Eisenberg

Vice President

Energy and Resources Policy

Leading Innovation. Creating Opportunity. Pursuing Progress.

733 10th Street, NW • Suite 700 • Washington, DC 20001 • P 202.637.3173 • F 202.637.3182 • www.nam.org

October 29, 2014

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

Attention Docket ID EPA-HQ-OEM-2014-0328

EPA Docket Center, U.S. EPA

Mailcode: 2822-1T

1200 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW

Washington, DC 20460

Re: Request for Information; Revisions to the EPA’s Risk Management 

Program Regulations

The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), the nation’s largest manufacturing 

trade association representing small and large manufacturers in every industrial sector and in all 

50 states, submits the following comments in response to the Environmental Protection 

Agency’s (EPA’s) Request for Information (RFI) of potential revisions to its Risk Management 

Program (RMP) regulations. 

The safety and security of facilities, employees, and communities is paramount to the 

NAM and its members. NAM members prudently engage in risk management planning and 

invest in security and believe that fostering continued information sharing between 

manufacturers and federal, state and local officials is critical to ensuring facility safety now and 

in the future. These public-private partnerships are currently providing the foundation for 

developing and implementing coordinated protection strategies that will ultimately prove most 

effective. That said, it is important that information submitted to the government be properly 

safeguarded to ensure against release to the public. Such releases of information could 

undermine the very security that any information sharing is seeking to enable. 

Along with voluntary measures to ensure the safety of their facilities, manufacturers 

comply with a suite of regulatory programs administered by several federal agencies including

the EPA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the U.S. Department of 

Transportation (DOT), the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Bureau of 

Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). Each of these agencies has their own 

regulatory programs that require operators to examine their operations and make them as safe 

and secure as possible. 

EPA must proceed with extreme caution as it considers expanding its own regulatory 

programs, such as the RMP program. Many of the categories of substances EPA lists in its RFI 

are already regulated by a different regulatory program and inclusion in the RMP program would 

only add costs, confusion and inefficiencies with little or no improvement to facility site security.

In response to EPA’s RFI, the NAM offers two examples where expansion of the RMP program 

may be inappropriate. 
1. Inherently Safer Technologies

EPA states that based on feedback from this RFI it may consider proposing a federal 

requirement to assess or implement so-called Inherently Safer Technologies (IST). To date, the 

EPA has long held that IST requirements would not produce additional benefits beyond those 

that already exist in the current RMP program structure.1 The NAM encourages the EPA to 

maintain this practice. As the NAM and 12 other trade associations noted in a January 23, 2014 

letter to the President of the United States and the Interagency Working Group on Improving 

Chemical Facility Safety and Security: 

Inherently safer approaches to manufacturing processes have been and will 

continue to be considered by facilities as a matter of course, and the facility 

operators—not the government—are in the best position to understand the full 

ramifications of implementing IST. No one regulatory program or government 

agency can properly address the broad range of factors such as risk shifting, 

technical efficacy, cost, and product quality that a facility must consider and 

address when choosing appropriate safety and security measures, much less all 

of the different site-specific scenarios for the approximately 12,000 facilities that 

could be impacted by an IST requirement under the RMP. In addition, decisions 

by government officials to require alternatives could impose new risks, such as 

more hazardous materials in transportation, if facilities must reduce inventories of 

certain substances.2

2. Combustible Dusts

EPA inquires as to whether adding “other” categories of substances such as combustible 

dusts to the RMP program would be appropriate. The NAM highlights this as an example in 

which such an action could result in regulatory duplication and conflict with OSHA, which is 

already engaged in the rulemaking process on this issue. Further, EPA should evaluate existing 

safety management programs for combustible dust, such as the National Fire Protection 

Association (NFPA) 68, a Standard on Explosion Protection by Deflagration Venting and 

consider exclusions from potential RMP requirements for facilities that are in compliance with 

such NFPA standards.

The safe operation of facilities and preventing future disasters like that in West, Texas in 

April 2013, is an interest shared by manufacturers, government and the general public. While 

there is a role for regulations in promoting this interest, unnecessary or duplicative polices can 

actually make facilities less safe by diverting resources away from programs that are most 

important to ensuring facility security. Where substances and processes are already regulated 

or in the process of being regulated by other agencies, the NAM encourages the EPA to avoid 

unnecessarily adding layers of new regulations. Government working productively with 

regulated industries will always produce the best results. 

 

1

Federal Register Volume 61, Number 120, FR Doc o: 96-14957 (Thursday, June 20, 1996): Pages 31668-31730, 

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-1996-06-20/html/96-14597.htm

2 Multi-association letter to the President of the United States and Interagency Working Group. January 23, 2014.

http://documents.nam.org/erp/Association_Letter_to_the_Working_Group_0123.pdf
The NAM appreciates the opportunity to comment on this important matter. 

Sincerely,

Ross Eisenberg