Letter to the Honorable Lisa Jackson, Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency - Ellison Urges EPA Administrator to Reduce Mercury Pollution

Letter

Dear Administrator Jackson:

We want to commend you for the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) efforts via the boiler MACT proposal to control the toxic pollution from industrial boilers, which collectively represent the second largest source of mercury pollution in the United States. The EPA's proposal, if finalized in its current form, will reduce mercury emissions from these sources by 15,000 pounds each year. Additionally, the proposed boiler MACT rule will save thousands of lives every year and spare thousands of people from hospital visits, missed work, missed schooldays, and a host of serious adverse health effects including asthma and heart attacks. In low-income and diverse communities of color, the benefits of reducing toxic air pollution cannot be overstated as these communities already face higher than average rates of asthma, birth defects, and respiratory disease. Overall, the public stands to gain between $14 billion and $38 billion in economic benefits. We strongly urge you to finalize emission standards for industrial boilers without weakening the protective reductions the agency has proposed.

Industrial boilers burn coal, oil, biomass, and natural gas for fuel and, largely because they have avoided control requirements to date, emit vast quantities of pollution. The EPA estimates that its rule will reduce mercury emissions from industrial boilers by 15,000 pounds each year, other toxic metals (including lead, arsenic, and chromium) by more than 3,200 tons, hydrogen chloride by more than 37,000 tons, particulate matter by more than 50,000 tons, and sulfur dioxide by more than 340,000 tons.

The EPA has estimated that the reductions in fine particulate pollution alone will prevent between 1,900 and 4,800 premature deaths every year. Further, the projected monetary value of the proposed rule's cumulative benefits to public health is between $17 billion and $41 billion dollars each year. These benefits vastly outweigh the rule's total costs to industry and, indeed, generate net economic benefits between $14 billion and $38 billion every year. Notably, these calculated benefits do not even count the lives saved and disease prevented by reducing industrial boilers' emissions of mercury, chromium, lead and other hazardous air pollutants. Contrary to claims advanced by some industry groups, EPA studies indicate that job losses resulting from the rule will be minimal and that compliance with the rule may actually generate as many as 12,000 new jobs.

Although the agency's rule is generally strong, it is accompanied by a dangerous exemption for facilities that choose to burn spent chemicals, scrap plastics, and other industrial wastes as fuel. The agency has proposed a regulatory definition of non-hazardous solid waste that would exclude these and similar materials when they are burned on-site -- an exclusion that would leave communities across the country vulnerable to toxic pollution from uncontrolled and unmonitored industrial waste incinerators. We urge the EPA to eliminate that exemption and protect the lives and health of communities living near facilities that burn waste as fuel.

As we observe the 40th Anniversary of the Clean Air Act, the EPA can pay no better tribute to the law's intent than to promulgate boiler MACT rules that reduce toxic air emissions and protect the lives of the American people.

Sincerely,

KEITH ELLISON
Member of Congress

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