Opinion ID: 519964
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Contaminated Environmental Media

Text: 51 Petitioners also challenge the EPA's assertion that environmental media (e.g., soil or groundwater) which are contaminated with hazardous wastes will themselves be considered hazardous wastes, and thus will be subject to the land disposal restrictions. Although petitioners appear to press their argument that this measure was adopted in violation of the APA's notice and comment requirements, we believe that the notice and comment argument actually adds nothing to their position. The EPA makes no attempt to defend the contaminated soil rule as a new regulation; the agency does not purport to have weighed the pros and cons of the policy within the course of the 1988 rulemaking. 13 Rather, the agency relies exclusively on the contention that the challenged rule is simply the application to environmental media of regulations adopted in 1980. If the EPA is correct in this assertion, then it was not required to provide notice or to consider comments in 1988. See American Hospital Association, supra p. 1534, 834 F.2d at 1045 (interpretive rules, which do not require notice and comment, are those which merely clarify or explain existing law or regulations) (citations omitted). See also American Postal Workers Union v. United States Postal Service, 707 F.2d 548, 560 (D.C.Cir.1983), cert. denied, 465 U.S. 1100, 104 S.Ct. 1594, 80 L.Ed.2d 126 (1984) the impact of a rule has no bearing on whether it is legislative or interpretative; interpretative rules may have a substantial impact on the rights of individuals). If the agency is wrong, then it cannot win on this issue no matter how much notice it provided. We therefore consider the merits of petitioners' challenge. 52
53 The agency makes two related arguments based on the 1980 regulations. First, the EPA asserts that these regulations clearly established that contaminated environmental media would be considered hazardous wastes. Therefore, the agency argues, [t]he Court need not consider petitioners' argument further, since it has been made eight years too late. Brief for EPA at 46. Second, the agency contends that to treat contaminated soil and groundwater as hazardous waste is in any event a reasonable interpretation of the 1980 rules. These arguments, while related, have quite different ramifications, and we will consider them in turn. 54 If the 1980 regulations (or the preamble thereto) clearly stated that contaminated environmental media would be covered, then petitioners' challenge would indeed be barred. The EPA correctly notes that the RCRA's ninety-day limit for seeking judicial review of agency regulations is jurisdictional. See Natural Resources Defense Council v. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 666 F.2d 595, 602 (D.C.Cir.1981). We do not believe, however, that the 1980 rules clearly provided that contaminated environmental media would be considered hazardous wastes. Neither the mixture nor the derived-from rule is by its terms directly applicable to contaminated soil or groundwater. 14 No other portion of the rules plainly applies, and the preamble issued by the agency at that time does not explicitly address the question. 55 Of course the EPA retains broad authority to issue interpretations of its rules which are reasonable though not compelled by the plain language of the rules themselves. And such interpretive statements, as we have seen, are not subject to the notice and comment requirements imposed by the APA. But to say that the agency is interpreting a preexisting regulation does not mean that judicial review of that interpretation is barred simply because a direct challenge to the rule itself would be untimely. The petitioners were required, within ninety days after the promulgation of the 1980 rules, to challenge any aspect of the rules which was clearly discernible from the language of the rules or from the agency's contemporaneous statements. The petitioners were not required, however, to anticipate every construction which the agency might later place upon its regulations. 15 Such an approach to the statutory time limits would impose hardships on individual petitioners; moreover, to require that challengers file these protective lawsuits would enmesh courts and agencies in irksome litigation concerning regulatory interpretations which had not been adopted and might never be adopted. Judicial review of an agency's interpretation of its own rules is, as we shall see, highly deferential, but deferential review is not the same as no review at all. 56
57 In reviewing the EPA's application of its 1980 rules to contaminated soil, we are guided by two fundamental principles. The first is that [a]n agency's interpretation of its own regulations will be accepted unless it is plainly wrong. General Carbon Company v. Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission, 860 F.2d 479, 483 (D.C.Cir.1988). The second is that on a highly technical question ... courts necessarily must show considerable deference to an agency's expertise. MCI Cellular Telephone Company v. FCC, 738 F.2d 1322, 1333 (D.C.Cir.1984). Taken together, these principles counsel extreme circumspection in our review of the agency's action. 58 The agency's rule, adopted in 1980, provides that [a] hazardous waste will remain a hazardous waste until it is delisted. 16 See 40 C.F.R. Secs. 261.3(c)(1), 261.3(d)(2). The petitioners argue in essence that an agglomeration of soil and hazardous waste is to be regarded as a new and distinct substance, to which the presumption of hazardousness no longer applies. The agency's position is that hazardous waste cannot be presumed to change character when it is combined with an environmental medium, and that the hazardous waste restrictions therefore continue to apply to waste which is contained in soil or groundwater. Certainly the EPA's position appears plausible on its face. Moreover, several other factors support the agency's interpretation of its rules. 59 In its preamble to the 1980 regulations, the agency sought to explain the circumstances under which a hazardous waste would cease to be a hazardous waste. The agency stated that a waste, once deemed hazardous, would ordinarily be presumed to retain its hazardous character. The EPA explained: As a practical matter, this means that facilities which store, dispose of or treat hazardous waste must be considered hazardous waste management facilities for as long as they continue to contain hazardous waste and that any wastes removed from such facilities--including spills, discharges or leaks--must be managed as hazardous wastes. 45 Fed.Reg. 33,096 (May 19, 1980). The preamble did not specifically refer to contaminated environmental media, and it is certainly true that hazardous wastes may spill or leak into solid waste rather than into soil or groundwater. Clearly, though, the EPA's current treatment of contaminated soil is entirely consistent with the 1980 preamble's insistence that hazardous wastes will ordinarily be presumed to remain hazardous. 60 The EPA's approach to contaminated environmental media is also consistent with the derived-from and mixture rules established in 1980. See 40 C.F.R. Secs. 261.3(c)(2)(i), 261.3(a)(2)(iv). 17 These rules provide that a hazardous waste will continue to be presumed hazardous when it is mixed with a solid waste, or when it is contained in a residue from treatment or disposal. The derived-from and mixture rules do not, it is true, apply by their own terms to contaminated soil or groundwater. See supra, p. 1538 n. 14. They nevertheless demonstrate that the agency's rule on contaminated soil is part of a coherent regulatory framework. It is one application of a general principle, consistently adhered to, that a hazardous waste does not lose its hazardous character simply because it changes form or is combined with other substances. In promulgating the mixture rule, the agency did not presume that every mixture of listed wastes and other wastes would in fact present a hazard. Rather, the agency reasoned that [b]ecause the potential combinations of listed wastes and other wastes are infinite, we have been unable to devise any workable, broadly applicable formula which would distinguish between those waste mixtures which are and are not hazardous. 45 Fed.Reg. 33,095 (May 19, 1980). The EPA therefore concluded that it was fair to shift to the individual operator the burden of establishing (through the delisting process) that its own waste mixture is not hazardous. Precisely the same logic applies to combinations of hazardous waste and soil or groundwater. 61 The EPA also asserts that its interpretation of the 1980 rules as covering contaminated soil and groundwater, though not previously published in the Federal Register, has frequently been applied to individual cases during the past decade. The agency cites several instances in which it has received petitions to delist environmental media contaminated with hazardous waste; such delisting would be unnecessary unless the contaminated soil or groundwater were deemed hazardous waste to begin with. See Brief for EPA at 48 & n. 48. We find these examples persuasive. We recognize that the acquiescence of particular companies does not signal the acquiescence of the entire industry, nor do we suggest that the petitioners are somehow barred from contesting this interpretation simply because it has been applied to others in the past. We nevertheless believe that, when we assess the reasonableness of the EPA's interpretation of its own rule, the consistency with which that interpretation has been applied in the past weighs in favor of the agency. Cf. NLRB v. United Food & Commercial Workers Union, 484 U.S. 112, 108 S.Ct. 413, 421 n. 20, 98 L.Ed.2d 429 (1987) (in determining whether an agency has reasonably interpreted a governing statute, courts should consider the consistency with which an agency interpretation has been applied). 18 62 The EPA's interpretation is also buttressed by one provision of the Hazardous Solid Waste Amendments of 1984, 42 U.S.C. Sec. 6924(e). Congress there provided that certain specified solvents and dioxins would be prohibited from land disposal. 42 U.S.C. Secs. 6924(e)(1), 6924(e)(2). The statute further provided that, for a two-year period after the effective date of the ban, the prohibition shall not apply to any disposal of contaminated soil or debris resulting from a response action taken under section 9604 or 9606 of this title or a corrective action required under this subchapter. 42 U.S.C. Sec. 6924(e)(3). This statutory exemption would of course have been superfluous unless contaminated soil would otherwise fall within the terms of the ban; the statute itself, however, made no explicit reference to a prohibition on land disposal of contaminated soil. This provision at least suggests that Congress assumed that the hazardousness of an underlying waste would be imputed to contaminated environmental media. 63 We need not decide whether any of these factors, or all of them taken together, would compel the conclusion that soil or groundwater contaminated with hazardous waste is itself a hazardous waste as defined by EPA regulations. We do believe, however, that, given the agency's broad discretion to interpret its own rules, it was entirely reasonable for the EPA to arrive at that conclusion. We therefore must sustain the agency's position.