Florida SWANA will host its 2024 Winter Conference, “Together Towards Tomorrow”, February 19-21 at the new Drury Plaza Hotel Orlando in Lake Buena Vista, Florida.
Conference host is developing an interesting and educational agenda of sessions and speakers who will discuss the latest developments in the solid waste industry. This will be an excellent time to share with and learn from your peers. For industry suppliers and service providers, this is a great opportunity to showcase your company’s products and services.
This multi-day conference will include general sessions on best practices in the solid waste management profession, networking events and more.
The conference is targeted towards local, state and municipal government solid waste directors, managers, regulators, operators and coordinators; in addition to private sector consulting engineers and suppliers of materials and equipment used in the management of solid waste.
Topics may include:
Click for more conference details and registration information. Plenty of SCS Engineers professionals will be there – we hope you will too!
The SMRI Fall conference features technical presentations and classes, field trips, workshops, and networking opportunities. The conference will also be live-streamed on October 2 & 3.
Carrie Ridley is a licensed professional geologist with over 20 years of regulatory experience in environmental and engineering geology. A former regulator, she oversaw the Kansas Class I, III, and V underground injection control program (UIC), underground hydrocarbon storage program, and the water well program. She also has experience as an RCRA project manager and permit writer. Early in her career, Ms. Ridley on geotechnical drilling programs and transportation-related construction QA/QC. More recently, she was the Primary Investigator and Project Manager of a Department of Energy CCUS project and worked on projects related to Carbon Sequestration, Critical Minerals, and Hydrogen Storage. Connect with Carrie on LinkedIn.
Ryan Francis, PG, has nearly two decades of experience, including senior management of a nationwide portfolio of petroleum storage tank closures; technical and project management of petroleum soil and groundwater site investigations and remediation; third-party technical review; property administrative controls; and geologist on record for multiple environmental projects in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas. Connect with Ryan on LinkedIn.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announces the availability of up to $4.6 billion of competitive grants. The grants are broken into two funding opportunities. The Climate Pollution Reduction Grants (CPRG) competition is designed to incentivize eligible applicants to apply for funding together as a coalition to implement GHG reduction measures regionally, across multiple municipalities, state boundaries, or even state and tribal boundaries. It includes funding for enhancing carbon removal, too.
Deadlines to Apply for Grants to Implement GHG Reduction
Under Funding Opportunity Number EPA-R-OAR-CPRGT-23-07, EPA announces approximately $4.3 billion for a general competition open to states, municipalities, air pollution control agencies, tribes, and territories for CPRG implementation grants. Tribes and territories interested in the general competition should seek the CPRG implementation grant “general competition” NOFO for more information. Applications for this implementation grants competition for tribes and territories are due on May 1, 2024.
Another $300 million for the CPRG implementation grants competition is exclusively for tribes and territories. Lead organizations for tribes and territories must submit their Priority Climate Action Plans to EPA by the deadline of April 1, 2024, in order for lead organizations and other eligible applicants under this announcement to submit grant applications to fund measures contained in those plans. EPA anticipates awarding approximately 25 to 100 grants ranging between $1 million and $25 million under this tribes and territories competition. Further detail on award tiers can be found in Table 1 of Section II.B.
Climate Change Disruptions
As the US faces the increasingly harmful impacts of climate change, communities are experiencing more deadly wildfires and storm surges, more extreme drought and water scarcity, and dangerous levels of flooding, among other impacts. The Fourth National Climate Assessment found that intense extreme weather, climate-related events, and changes in average climate conditions are expected to continue damaging infrastructure, ecosystems, and social systems that provide essential benefits to communities. If left unchecked, future climate change is expected to disrupt many areas of life further and exacerbate existing challenges to prosperity posed by aging and deteriorating infrastructure, stressed ecosystems, and long-standing inequalities.
Grants to Support Your Communities
Our country’s daunting challenge comes with an opportunity to invest in a cleaner economy that will spur innovation and economic growth while building more equitable, resilient communities. Accordingly, the Climate Pollution Reduction Grants program is designed to achieve the following goals:
1. Implement ambitious measures that will achieve significant cumulative GHG reductions by 2030 and beyond;
2. Pursue measures that will achieve substantial community benefits (such as reduction of criteria air pollutants (CAPs) and hazardous air pollutants (HAPs));
3. Complement other funding sources to maximize these GHG reductions and community benefits; and,
4. Pursue innovative policies and programs that are replicable and can be “scaled up” across multiple jurisdictions.
What Qualifies as a GHG Reduction Measure?
Treatments and solutions that reduce GHG emissions or enhance carbon removal can qualify. Measures that enhance carbon removal increase carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere through, for example, the uptake of carbon and storage. Other measures may include EPA-approved technologies. Documentation must be provided to support the estimated GHG emission reductions for each proposed measure. Depending upon the proposed solution, you’ll need a well-conceived plan and data from a reliable environmental engineer or an environmental or sustainability consultant.
Who’s Eligible?
Eligible applicants for the CPRG implementation grants competitions are lead organizations for CPRG planning grants and other executive branch-level agencies, offices, and departments in states, D.C., Puerto Rico, municipalities, tribes, tribal consortia, territories, and groups of such entities applying for funding to implement measures contained in one or more applicable Priority Climate Action Plan developed with funding from a CPRG planning grant.
Additional Resources
Webinars:
EPA will host overview webinars for each implementation grant competition for eligible applicants and other interested parties over the coming weeks. All sessions will be one hour long. EPA will post recordings of each webinar to the CPRG website. You can click the links below to register for one or more scheduled sessions.
| Date | Time (ET) | Event Topic | Register |
| Sept. 21 | 2:30 pm | General competition webinar | Register here |
| Sept. 27 | 2:00 pm | Tribe and territories only competition webinar | Register here |
| Oct. 3 | 3:00 pm | General competition webinar (repeat) | Register here |
| Oct. 5 | 1:00 pm | Tribe and territories only competition webinar (repeat) | Register here |
About CALRC
It’s time for the California Land Recycling Conference (CALRC) in Carson, California, September 26-28. The Center for Creative Land Recycling (CCLR) is hosting the conference, and this year’s event theme is “People, Partnerships, Progress.”
SCS Engineers is exceptionally proud of our relationship with CCLR and of our clients who are winning Phoenix, EBJ, and other awards for their valuable contributions to their communities across all 50 states.
Environmental Justice
Achieving environmental justice means taking a sustainable, holistic approach to site remediation and land recycling. One that meets each party’s social, environmental, and economic goals. These experts can help; they’ve been in the business of sustainability for decades and are always open to knowledge sharing about funding, permitting, and remediation processes that will keep your project on track.
Headline Presentations
Should it Stay or Should it Go? In-situ vs. Ex-situ Solutions with Michael McLaughlin of SCS Engineers, Senior Vice President of Environmental Services and National Specialist on Brownfields & Landfill Redevelopment
Tuesday, September 26th at 3:15 PM in the Community Hall Section A
With numerous approaches and examples of pilot studies, innovative technologies, and work done to execute alternatives to excavation, this session will help you overcome the practical challenges of sustainable remediation. With an overview of conducting pilot tests and examples of innovative technologies, this session will help project managers and site owners take the next steps in bringing sustainable solutions to clean up contaminated sites and answer the question, can in-situ technologies be used to avoid costly excavation and disposal?
Getting to the Finish Line: Navigating Projects Through the Water Board Process with Jim Ritchie, Vice President, SCS Engineers.
Wednesday, September 27th at 10:30 am in the Community Hall Section A
We aim to get your remediation or brownfields project done sustainably, meeting economic and environmental goals such as the mission of the Water Boards to preserve the quality of California’s water resources and drinking water to protect the environment, public health, and beneficial uses. Join Jim and company to learn the best practices.
The other night, I woke up in a bit of a panic and thought that I must have missed an announcement by the USEPA regarding the PM2.5 NAAQS reconsideration! Did I?
The answer, thankfully, is no! However, that is not any reason to relax and take no action.
By way of background, the Clean Air Act requires that the USEPA set National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) for each of the criteria air pollutants, including particulate matter (PM). These NAAQS are based on the best available science and aim to protect human health and welfare. In June of 2021, the USEPA announced that they would reconsider the 2020 PM NAAQS final action under the prior administration that did not lower any standards. Then, in January 2023, the USEPA published the proposed rule to revise the PM2.5 primary annual standard down from 12 micrograms per cubic meter (µg/m3) to within a range of 9-10 µg/m3. In that proposal, the agency retained the 24-hour standard of 35 µg/m3.
The comment period for this proposed rule has since closed, and the agency is now working through over 5,000 submitted comments. It is unclear when the USEPA will issue the final rule (it could be any day now) and if the new annual standard will be set at 9 or 10 or something in between.
What does this mean for me as a regulated source? What should you do? SCS Engineers recommends the following actions:
Additional Resources:
About the Author: Rafe Christopherson, PE, is a project director and SCS’s industrial Clean Air Act leader. He is an air quality professional with a wide variety of experience over his 25-year career. His expertise includes consulting, working at an air quality regulatory agency and with industry. His expertise includes semiconductors, biofuels, pulp and paper, hardwoods, power generation, refineries, and general manufacturing. If you are interested in more information on this PM2.5 NAAQS reconsideration process and what it might mean for your business, you may reach Rafe at or via LinkedIn.
Meet SCS Engineers Environmental Professionals at the largest and most prestigious gathering in California of Leaders in Environmental, Land Use, and Natural Resources Law. The 32nd Annual Environmental Law Conference at Yosemite will be held October 19-22, at Tenaya Lodge in Fish Camp/Yosemite, California.
As a Saturday Night Dinner Sponsor, SCS will have a display table and conduct a raffle!
We hope you will join us and many of our nation’s top environmental officials, lawyers, and other professionals for four days of legal education and collegiality in Yosemite for the 32nd Annual Environmental Law Conference at Yosemite®.
On August 17, 2023, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released the first of twelve datasets (representing approximately 7% of the total data that it plans to collect) on 29 polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) and lithium (an alkali metal) in our nation’s drinking water. This sampling will continue through 2026, and is the latest action delivering on the EPA PFAS Strategic Roadmap, which dictates that PFAS (an emerging contaminant pending regulations under CERCLA) requires a multi-agency approach and specific actionable steps to assess risks to human and environmental health better, hold polluters accountable, and identify the extent of the problem.
Monitoring PFAS and lithium is currently under the fifth Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule (UCMR 5). The Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) requires that the EPA issue a list of unregulated but potentially harmful contaminants every five years and devise a protocol for monitoring those contaminants in public water systems (PWSs).
The current UCMR 5 regulatory framework allows for collecting PFAS and lithium data throughout the United States. It aims to create science-based decision-making regarding how to address these chemicals best. Results, which will get quarterly updates, can be reviewed by the public on the EPA’s National Contaminant Occurrence Database.
While there is not currently a final drinking water standard in place for PFAS, EPA has already issued health advisories for four PFAS compounds, and two of them – perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS) – have also been proposed for entry as hazardous substances under CERCLA, as of March 2023. The timeline for the final rule on PFAS CERCLA designation is now February 2024. Landfills and other passive receivers are seeking relief from CERCLA contribution litigation prior to designating PFAS as hazardous substances, as they have no control over the use and disposal of hundreds of thousands of products containing PFOA and PFOS.
This first set of data does appear to raise some red flags, though it is not uniformly indicative of widespread contamination. In Missouri, for example, 1,923 distinct water samples were obtained from 22 different PWSs (from a mix of wells and treatment plants) in communities throughout the state. Of these samples, 23 are scattered between 11 facilities containing lithium at concentrations in excess of the laboratory Method Reporting Limit (MRL) of 9 micrograms per liter (µg/L), some by many orders of magnitude. Only two PFAS compounds (PFOS and PFHxS) are above their MRLs (0.004 µg/L and 0.003 µg/L, respectively), both from the North Rodeo Well of the Camdenton PWS.
This data will ultimately be immensely useful for public sector officials trying to make policy decisions regarding PFAS and lithium management, fine-tuning community engagement/education efforts, and for private sector industries seeking to get a handle on potential liabilities. SCS Engineers and other qualified environmental firms are poised to be essential partners to national leaders in identifying and remedying emerging contaminants such as PFAS. Many technologies proven to work on a large scale are available, with more promising technologies on the horizon.
Find additional regulatory information using the links below:
Impacts on Sectors and Treatments:
About the Author: Rachel McShane, LEP, has over 15 years of experience in environmental due diligence projects (Phase I, II and III Environmental Site Assessments) as well as Brownfields redevelopment, risk-based corrective action, and remediation projects. She is familiar with National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) environmental assessments, vapor investigations and mitigation, radon, asbestos, lead-based paint surveys, and leachate monitoring/solid waste management. Reach Ms. McShane at or via LinkedIn.
Meet SCS Engineers brownfields experts, Candy Elliott, PG, and Melissa Schick, at our Booth at the Southeast Brownfields Conference and EPA New Grantee Workshop, September 21-22, in Pelham, Alabama.
Alabama Brownfields Association (ALBFA ) is hosting this annual event which includes a one-day technical conference plus EPA Region IV holding its New Grantee Workshop across two half-days. The conference is a forum for environmental professionals, state environmental agencies, tribes, local governments, and community stakeholders interested in brownfield redevelopment. Event registrants are able to attend a reception held on the evening of the 21st.
Click for more conference details and registration information
We hope to see you there!
In her paper, Utilizing Multiphase Flow Modeling to Estimate CO2 Solution Storage Efficiency and Sequestration Project Size, author Kacey Garber discusses how developing an understanding of CO2 storage efficiency and CO2 capacity estimates for a Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) project will help you properly scope your project location and therefore maximize the benefits CCS has to offer.
The storage component of a CCS project requires a Class VI Underground Injection Control permit to inject supercritical CO2. These permits require multiphase flow modeling to delineate both the extent of the injected supercritical CO2 and areas that exceed a critical pressure threshold as a result of injection. SCS has found this modeling to also be valuable during project scoping to provide a sense of the total CO2 storage capacity for a given project.
Kacey walks through a case study that utilized a multiphase flow model to investigate what operational parameters would lead to the most efficient use of pore space for a CCS project in development. This included examining the effects of different injection rates, durations, and locations and investigating multi-injection well scenarios. This case study ultimately shows that a multiphase flow model will help you meet the requirements for your Class VI injection well permit application; it will also help you right-size your CCS project during the planning phase. Incorporating project-specific considerations into the model will help you identify operational conditions ideal for maximizing CO2 storage efficiency.
Additional Resources:
Capturing carbon and injecting it into a carbon sequestration well, also called a Class VI Well, is an EPA-approved technology. Manufacturers and industries are considering using carbon sequestration to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (CO2). Often, the public is concerned that carbon injection wells could contaminate underground drinking water — a legitimate concern, given today’s headlines. In this environmental engineering blog, we’ll describe the two ways underground drinking water could be contaminated and how to prevent it.
Contamination can occur if the CO2 can migrate up the well bore into the aquifer anytime after injection. The second instance is if pressure forces the brine from the injection zone into the aquifer.
Environmental engineering teams, which include professional geologists, hydrogeologists, and geoscience experts, take steps and provide well-operators guidance to protect drinking water sources, including calculating the Area of Review (AOR) around the injection well and computational modeling to understand how the pressures can build up during injection to create unsafe conditions.
Armed with expert knowledge and more modeling accuracy, operators can prevent contamination, extend the life of carbon sequestration wells, and address public concerns.
Dr. Charles Hostetler explains in the SCS educational video how accurately calculating the AOR and understanding critical pressure work together so companies can confidently use carbon capture and sequestration to reduce greenhouse gas emissions safely.
Click to watch
At SCS, we’re always available to answer questions – contact SCS at or find an office near you. Human Resources would like to hear from you if you desire a rewarding career working with companies to help them run efficiently and cleaner.
About the Speaker: Dr. Charles Hostetler has nearly four decades of experience as a consulting hydrogeologist. His expertise includes permitting, interacting with regulatory agencies and stakeholder groups, and numerical modeling of hydrogeological processes.
Additional Carbon Sequestration Resources:
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