Environmental

Waller Lansden's environmental attorneys serve as counsel on RCRA issues for clients in a wide range of industries, including manufacturing, real estate development, transportation, and waste management.  This work covers hazardous waste generation, management, treatment and disposal; as well non-hazardous solid waste disposal.  Our RCRA hazardous waste practice focuses on counseling hazardous waste generators and treatment facilities on issues concerning compliance with RCRA's tangled regulatory scheme.  Our advice has helped clients design or reengineer industrial processes to avoid the client's materials being regulated as solid or hazardous waste.  In other cases, our defense enforcement proceedings have saved clients from huge penalties.  With respect to solid waste, our attorneys represent national waste management companies in permitting, compliance, and enforcement matters.  We have been successful in obtaining permit extensions for landfills in increasingly populated areas, and have assisted clients in acquisitions of existing landfill facilities.  Our attorneys are frequent authors and speakers on waste-related topics.

Significant Matters

• Represented major manufacturing facilities in dispute with EPA in nationwide enforcement initiative, centered on the definition of solid waste and recycling.  Our involvement included representation of the industry at EPA headquarters, and in litigation over informal rulemaking; defense of state enforcement in multiple jurisdictions; and filing industry comments in formal rulemaking concerning definition of solid waste
• Advice to one industrial recycling client concerning treatment of hazardous waste by generators saved approximately $1 million in annual operating costs
• Negotiated an asset purchase agreement  of an existing municipal solid waste landfill in conjunction with our corporate lawyers, and coordinated due diligence on the regulatory status and future prospects for the landfill operations.
• Following our advice concerning the careful design of one client's recycling operation, material that exhibited the toxicity characteristic was excluded from RCRA regulation, avoiding the prohibitively expensive requirement that the client's facilities be permitted as hazardous waste storage and treatment facilities
• Guided a major national landfill company through local, regional, and state approvals of a 20-year expansion of a 4000-ton-per-day landfill located in an increasingly suburban setting.  This representation included government relations work with the state legislature, regulatory work with the state solid waste agency, enforcement work with the state agency’s office of general counsel, and public relations work with regional and local officials.
• Represented a national hazardous waste treatment company in the acquisition of major commercial TSD facility in Tennessee, including transfer of existing permits
• Managed company response to FBI search warrant and internal investigation of allegations in successful defense to accusions of illegal disposal of hazardous waste made by disgruntled former employee