Comment submitted by Andrea George, Associate Director for Laboratory and Environmental Compliance, Vanderbilt Environmental Health and Safety, Vanderbilt University

"George, Andrea K" <andrea.george@Vanderbilt.Edu> 08/17/2006 05:07 PM To: Group Rcra-Docket@EPA cc: Subject: Comment on Proposed Rule: Subpart K - Standards Applicable to Academic Laboratories (71 FR 29712) I am writing on behalf of Vanderbilt University in Nashville TN to support the two comments excerpted below from the set of comments submitted to you on August 14 from the National Safety Council and the Campus Safety Health and Environmental Management Association (CSHEMA): "CSHEMA disagrees with the discussion on page 29723 of the preamble about excluding laboratories in hospitals affiliated with universities from the definition, and discuss this further below. Teaching hospitals which are an integral part of medical schools may house academic and research facilities in addition to providing patient care. Personnel, including students, faculty, and researchers may move between the hospital and other academic facilities in the course of their work. The university should have the option to include hospital laboratories under its Laboratory Management Plan if it wishes to do so. This will avoid the confusion inherent in having a different set of standards for similar facilities in different campus buildings, and lend more coherence to the institution?s hazardous waste management program. We believe that the similarities in hazardous waste generation and management between other academic laboratories and those in university hospitals outweigh the differences. " "College and university photo laboratories and darkrooms are used on a non-production basis for research and teaching. Photo laboratories and darkrooms are used to preserve and teach old photographic techniques, and for creative work by artists and art students. Photo laboratories and darkrooms are used in research, for example, for capturing radioactive decay and time lapse information." Vanderbilt University is a top-20 private university with 10,000 students and almost 20,000 employees. A significant part of Vanderbilt University is the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, a non-profit academic medical research center with a School of Medicine and School of Nursing which support a nationally-known Level 1 Trauma Center, 850-bed hospital, a 215-bed Children's Hospital, a Psychiatric Hospital, a Rehabilitation Hospital and all of their associated clinics. We are one corporate entity with one Board of Trust and one environmental health and safety department, and we manage our hazardous waste identically whether it is generated in a hospital lab, a darkroom, or in a chemistry lab. We are also a Large Quantity Generator of hazardous waste with ONE EPA ID NUMBER who shipped ~160,000 lbs of chemical waste in 2005, has 550 satellite waste accumulation areas on campus, and annually trains more than 3,000 faculty, staff and students on RCRA hazardous waste management requirements. 80% of the hazardous waste generated on our campus comes from our Medical Center. Our hospital laboratories are used to support both patient care and research, as many of our patients are actually in research projects. Every physician on our campus is a faculty member in our School of Medicine. The staff that work in the hospital labs also many times work in research labs on campus. The same is true of photographic labs and darkrooms on campus - they are not production labs but are used in our School of Medicine to support research by processing films taken of bacteria, viruses, etc. The same faculty and staff that perform the research process the photos in the darkrooms. Many darkrooms are even located within what would be currently defined as a laboratory under the proposed Subpart K. We have worked very hard over the past decade to implement easily understood training and hazardous waste management systems to thousands of people throughout our institution, including our medical center. We have a successful system in place as was evidenced by the positive results of our inspection by EPA Region 4 and the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation on November 3, 2005. We are also in the process currently of implementing an Environmental Management System on our campus. We would never be able to train the thousands of faculty, staff, and students that move daily between hospital labs and research labs and darkrooms on two different sets of requirements and expect any level of compliance or understanding at all. If Subpart K stands as proposed and we are not allowed to include our hospital or photo laboratories, then we will not be able to opt into Subpart K even though we believe it is an extremely positive step forward for EPA and the college and university sector and would very much like to be able to opt in. We will not be able to opt in because we believe that implementing two sets of standards throughout our laboratories would degrade our ability to properly manage hazardous waste and would degrade our ability to properly implement an Environmental Management System by being unnecessarily complicated, confusing, and cumbersome to our faculty and staff. Thus, we believe the implementation of Subpart K as proposed on our campus would actually degrade our environmental compliance through errors and confusion, not improve it. We understand the differences between labs and maintenance activities and are not requesting that university maintenance activities be included in Subpart K. Maintenance activities are performed by dedicated staff who CAN be effectively trained on their own set of requirements. Vanderbilt University requests that the EPA amend this proposed rule to include in the definition of "laboratory" those hospital labs and "photo labs" or darkrooms that are under the administrative control of the college or university or as set forth in the Laboratory Management Plan. We believe that this request is fully in-line with the concept that Subpart K be "performance-based" - to be performance-based, it should allow each university to define the labs to be included under subpart K requirements that provide for the most effective and efficient protection of the environment. We appreciate EPA's efforts to understand and improve hazardous waste management at colleges and universities throughout the country and to work collaboratively with the college and university sector. We respectfully submit these comments on behalf of Vanderbilt University, in support of CSHEMA, and in good faith to make the rule more universally successful while protecting human health and the environment. Thank you very much in advance, Andrea George Andrea George MS, CHMM Associate Director for Laboratory and Environmental Compliance Vanderbilt Environmental Health and Safety Vanderbilt University Nashville, TN (615) 322-4551 office