Universities seek changes to lab waste rules

College and university officials seeking changes to federal regulations governing academic laboratories' chemical wastes recently met with White House officials. Representatives of the American Council on Education, universities, and a research institution suggested that EPA set a performance-based standard for the management of "academic chemical waste," according to documents made public by the White House after the March 21 meeting. This would create a new category of hazardous waste encompassing "chemical waste resulting from teaching, research, and related activities at institutions of higher education." Under the proposal, academic chemical waste would be handled under a different set of rules from those covering hazardous waste generated by businesses. Currently, academic and research laboratories often struggle to comply with prescriptive hazardous waste rules that were written for industrial situations. Hundreds of schools, large and small, have gotten into trouble with EPA for compliance problems (C&EN, Nov. 22, 2004, page 43). Institutions of higher learning have been asking EPA for years to make it less complicated for them to handle hazardous waste appropriately.