This week’s post includes an excerpt from our co-authored article PFAS will be increasing concern for manufacturers in year ahead,” published in the Hartford Business Journal’s Economic Forecast issue on January 8, 2024.

PFAS — perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances — have been on the scene for years now, but we expect to see

This week’s post is authored by Emilee Mooney Scott and is also available on Robinson+Cole’s Environmental Law + blogThank you to Emilee for contributing. Emilee is a partner in the firm’s Environmental, Energy + Telecommunications Group, focusing her practice on a variety of environmental compliance and transactional matters, including emerging contaminants.

As we

This week’s post is authored by Emilee Mooney Scott and is also available on Robinson+Cole’s Environmental Law + blog. Thank you to Emilee for contributing. Emilee is a partner in the firm’s Environmental, Energy + Telecommunications Group, focusing her practice on a variety of environmental compliance and transactional matters, including emerging contaminants.

In mid-March

Thank you to Emilee Mooney Scott for this post.  Emilee is a member of Robinson+Cole’s Environment, Energy + Telecommunications practice group.  She focuses her practice on environmental compliance, transactional and remediation matters, including matters related to emerging contaminants like PFAS.

Last week, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released a pre-publication version of a Proposed

Earlier this month, EPA set new lifetime health advisories for four per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) – in some instances at levels lower than those that can be detected through laboratory testing. The new health advisories are listed below:

PFASHealth Advisory (in parts per trillion)
PFOA (perflurooctanoic acid)0.004 ppt
PFOS (perfluorooctane sulfonic acid)

As we reported at the beginning of the year, President Biden has been making environmental justice one of his priorities since long before he took office. The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently took a step to add some teeth to the Biden Administration’s commitment to increase environmental enforcement in communities disproportionally impacted by

This week we are pleased to have a guest post from Emilee Mooney Scott, a member of Robinson+Cole’s Environment, Energy + Telecommunications practice group.  Emilee focuses her practice on environmental transactional and compliance matters, with a particular focus on the management of hazardous and toxic substances.

The Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) has long provided EPA with authority to review new chemical substances in a gatekeeper role as such substances enter U.S. commerce. Through amendments in 2016, EPA was also given the authority to evaluate selected existing chemical substances using a three-step framework (explained in further detail here). There are a few dozen substances in the pipeline now, with the first ten substances almost at the end of a long process that will culminate in substance-specific rules. Around the fifth anniversary of the TSCA amendments later this year, the first round of risk management rules should be proposed. These risk management rules could have significant impacts on manufacturers that use the substances in question, and will provide insight on EPA’s approach to such rules going forward.
Continue Reading Chemical “Risk Management Rules” on the Horizon for 2021

As we previously reported, EPA published a PFAS Action Plan in 2019 designed to enhance and improve data gathering, regulatory development, enforcement, and communication related to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). EPA continues to make progress implementing the PFAS Action Plan and is working on a more formal framework for addressing PFAS under the

This week we are pleased to have a guest post from Robert S. Melvin, a member of Robinson+Cole’s Environmental, Energy + Telecommunications Group. Attorney Melvin has over 20 years of experience counseling clients on environmental, health, and safety compliance, sustainability, emergency response efforts, site remediation, and development projects. A wide range of clients benefit from his services, including aerospace and other manufacturers, stone and aggregate producers, metal finishers, municipalities, educational institutions, and water and wastewater utilities.

In these days of working from home and managing countless other demands on our time, we offer this post to help you decide whether to add the latest Clean Water Act (CWA) cases and rules to your must-see legal watch list. Since its 1972 inception, the Clean Water Act has prohibited any unpermitted “discharge,” defined as “any addition of any pollutant to navigable waters from any point source.” For more than four decades, agencies and courts have struggled with this CWA liability trigger in various circumstances, as well as the CWA’s vague definition of “navigable waters” as “waters of the United States” (WOTUS).
Continue Reading Binge-Watching the Clean Water Act Cases and Rules