National Clothesline

The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia last month granted a motion by the International Fabricare Institute to intervene as a defendant in a suit filed by the Sierra Club against the Environmental Protection Agency.

The Sierra Club brought suit against EPA over the agency’s failure to issue air emission standards within a time-line specified by the Clean Air Act. An order telling EPA to revise its air emission standards for perc is one of several things the Sierra Club seeks in its lawsuit.

EPA issued its clean air standards for the drycleaning industry in 1993. But the Clean Air Act requires EPA to review and revise the standards no less often than every eight years. The eight-year time limit ran out in September, 2001.

The Sierra Club filed suit in May to force EPA to meet the requirements of the law. IFI then filed a motion to intervene on behalf of the cleaning industry.

Typically in suits like the one filed by EPA, the agency knows it has missed the statutory deadline and can not prevail in court. Therefore, it will enter into a consent decree that outlines what it will do and when it will do it. The motion sought and won by IFI will give the industry a place at the negotiating table when EPA and the Sierra Club discuss the terms of the consent decree.

Negotiations over the consent decree, IFI said, could affect new EPA standards as much or more than any subsequent discussion that take place when EPA actually publishes new standards for comments.

One alternative that EPA has is to make a final determination that revisions to the drycleaning standards are not needed. But the agency could also revisit the 1993 standards. EPA, for example, has been considering additional air standards that could affect co-located drycleaning facilities, that is, drycleaning plants located in the same building as residences or other businesses.

IFI said it expects negotiations over the review of EPA’s air emission standards pertaining to perc to begin sometime in the next few months. IFI CEO Bill Fisher and the IFI’s legal counsel will be present during the processing to, in IFI’s words, “ensure that the Sierra Club does not simply dictate its policy to the EPA.”

In its motion to the district court, IFI’s lawyers stressed that IFI and its members “have a direct and vital interest in any efforts to review or revise the NESHAP”; that any revision to the perc emissions standard “could directly impact IFI members’ operations”; and that the Sierra Club’s complaint “in effect would exclude IFI from remaining a part of an important stage in the potential further development of emissions reduction efforts” and would leave the IFI’s interests “undefended” in the dispute since neither group — the Sierra Club nor EPA — can adequately represent IFI’s interests.