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The National Waste & Recycling Association (“NWRA”) filed a Petition for Review (“Petition”) before the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit challenging a Final Action undertaken by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) titled:
Final Emission Factors for AP-42 Chapter 2, Section 4 - Municipal Solid Waste Landfills (“Final Emission Factors”).
See Case No. 24-13421.
The NWRA describes itself in part as a:
…trade association that represents private sector waste and recycling companies in the United States, and manufacturers and service providers who do business with those companies.
The Final Emission Factors challenged by NWRA are an update by EPA for municipal solid waste landfills. Environmental organizations had previously threatened to sue EPA under the Clean Air Act arguing that the federal agency had not revised the emission factors for municipal solid waste landfills since 1998. They had argued, among other things, that certain emissions from landfills were being underestimated.
An emission factor is a representative value that attempts to relate the quantity of the pollutant released to the atmosphere with an activity associated with the release of that pollutant. Such factors may be expressed as the weight of pollutant divided by unit weight, volume, distance, or duration of the activity emitting the pollutant. Such factors can facilitate estimation of emissions from various sources of air pollution. Factors are sometimes simply averages of all available data of acceptable quality, and are generally assumed to be representative of long-term averages for all facilities in the source category (i.e., a population average).
EPA has since 1972 published several compilations of available emissions factors.
A copy of the Petition can be downloaded here.
