AGC’s Environmental Network Steering Committee Meets with EPA

On December 9-10, ten members of AGC’s Environmental Network Steering Committee and national AGC environmental staff met with officials and staff from several U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) program offices.  Those offices include Solid Waste and Emergency Response, Policy, Economics and Innovation, Water, Air and Radiation, and the EPA Green Building Workgroup. The group discussed ways to quantify the amount of construction and demolition (C&D) debris that is generated and to encourage the reduction, reuse and recycling of such materials.  They also discussed progress in completing a joint AGC-EPA draft white paper and online toolkit on recycling and reuse of C&D materials. Other topics of discussion included AGC and EPA’s joint partnership work under the “Sector Strategies” Program to reduce the construction industry’s environmental burden and the new 2008 Sector Performance Report and EPA’s newly proposed Effluent Limitation Guidelines for the construction and development industries.  AGC and EPA representatives also discussed EPA clean air rules and initiatives that impact construction, including an update on off-road retrofit technologies, federal funding for diesel engine retrofit, requirements being placed on contractors to retrofit/replace their existing in-use equipment and the status of California’s off-road retrofit/replacement rule and the implications for other states. EPA’s newly released Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR) on using the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions was discussed.  EPA received over 200,000 comments in response to the ANPR, and  AGC, its Chapters and more than 300 members submitted comments stating that the Clean Air Act is not the right tool to regulate GHG.