East St Louis Deserves Clean Air!

The US EPA recently proposed a new air permit for the Veolia hazardous waste incinerator in Sauget, Illinois (near East ST louis). The Veolia incinerator is a significant source of hazardous air pollutant emissions in East St. Louis and surrounding areas. Among the pollutants Veolia emits are hazardous metals including arsenic, cadmium, mercury, and lead, which have known negative health effects.

The EPA issued Veolia an air permit in January 2017 after years of effort. That permit included new monitoring and testing requirements that EPA said were necessary to ensure that Veolia is in compliance with federal limits on emissions of hazardous metals.

However, when Veolia challenged the permit, the Trump EPA quickly agreed to settle instead of standing up for nearby residents’ health. As part of the settlement agreement EPA is proposing a new permit to replace the permit it issued in 2017, with changes sought by Veolia. Send a message to the US EPA asking for the monitoring to be put back in the permit.

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Re: Docket ID No. EPA-R05-OAR-2014-0280

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I am writing to ask you to put continuous heavy metal monitoring back into Veolia’s Clean Air Act Permit. East St Louis suffers from some of the worst air pollution in all of Illinois, and suffers even worse if the heavy metals coming from Veolia's incinerator go unmonitored. The current proposed permit eliminates the provision requiring Veolia to install continuous multi-metals monitoring devices. EPA has previously stated that the data these monitors would provide “is essential to protecting human health and the environment in the Sauget area” and that they are “necessary to fulfill EPA’s obligations as the permitting authority.” Given EPA’s own analysis, these monitors should not be removed from the permit. It also waters down a provision requiring Veolia to test all incoming waste for hazardous metals. Under the proposed permit, different testing procedures would apply to “suspect” and “non-suspect” waste, and the procedures would be less rigorous than those in the 2017 permit regardless of how waste is categorized. When Veolia first proposed categorizing waste as “suspect” or “non-suspect,” EPA said it “would not accept Veolia’s proposed categorization … because we believe certain ‘non-suspect’ wastes that actually contain high levels of metals could slip through the cracks.” Critically, EPA has not provided any new information or data to justify these changes. It simply “re-evaluated” the data it previously said supported more rigorous monitoring and testing requirements and changed its mind. Please put public health before Veolia’s profits.