## Facts

- Chemical Waste Management of Indiana, Inc. operated the Adams Center hazardous-waste landfill in Allen County, Indiana.
- EPA Region V renewed the facility’s Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) hazardous-waste permit, allowing continued disposal operations.
- Community members and organizations opposed renewal, asserting that the facility’s impacts would disproportionately burden nearby minority and low-income residents and compound existing harms.
- During the permit process, Region V held a community informational meeting and performed a demographic analysis of residents within approximately one mile of the facility.
- Region V concluded, based on its review, that the renewed permit would not cause an adverse impact on health or the environment in the nearby communities.
- Petitioners sought administrative review by the EPA Environmental Appeals Board (EAB), arguing that Region V had not adequately evaluated or addressed the environmental-justice concerns and should have denied, modified, or further conditioned the permit.

## Issues

1. Whether environmental-justice concerns must be evaluated in an EPA RCRA permitting decision and, if so, whether they operate as an independent basis to deny or overturn a permit.
2. Whether Region V’s record development—public meeting, demographic analysis, and responses to comments—adequately addressed the environmental-justice objections.
3. Whether any deficiency in Region V’s consideration of the objections required remand, additional fact-finding, or added permit conditions.

## Decision

- The EAB denied review and allowed Region V’s permit renewal decision to stand.
- The EAB accepted Region V’s conclusion that renewal would not adversely affect health or the environment of nearby minority and low-income communities on the record presented.
- The EAB treated environmental-justice allegations as relevant to permitting and required that they be meaningfully addressed in the administrative record.
- The EAB declined to vacate, remand, or require additional permit conditions based solely on the environmental-justice objections as presented.

## Legal Principles

- Environmental-justice concerns raised in RCRA permitting are cognizable and must be addressed in the permitting record through reasoned explanation and supporting analysis.
- Environmental justice does not function as a free-standing legal standard for permit denial absent a specific statutory or regulatory directive; it is considered through existing RCRA health-and-environment protections and permit criteria.
- A challenger must connect environmental-justice claims to specific, record-supported environmental or health impacts (including evidence of incremental or disproportionate risk) to justify overturning or remanding a permit decision.
- Adequate procedures for addressing environmental-justice objections include meaningful public participation opportunities and documented agency responses supported by relevant data (including demographic information).

## Conclusion

The EAB upheld EPA Region V’s renewal of a hazardous-waste facility’s RCRA permit, holding that environmental-justice concerns must be taken seriously and addressed in the administrative record, but that generalized allegations of disparate burden, without concrete record-based evidence of additional or disproportionate health or environmental risk, do not require permit denial or remand.


In re Chemical Waste Mgmt. of Ind., Inc., 6 E.A.D. 66 (EAB 1995)