Industry and environmental groups are squaring off in court over recently updated air toxics regulations for makers of a key coal product.
The public health risk posed by emissions from coke manufacturing plants remains “unacceptable,” Environmental Integrity Project attorney Haley Lewis said in a Wednesday news release announcing a lawsuit against EPA filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. In failing to protect the public, Lewis said, the updated standards don’t “require industry to install modern pollution control technologies that are readily available.”
In the suit, she is helping to represent the Alabama-based group, People Against Neighborhood Industrial Contamination (PANIC), and a half-dozen other organizations, most based in states that are home to what EPA counts as 11 active coke plants.
Also contesting the regulations in the D.C. Circuit in separate filings are Illinois-based SunCoke Energy and two industry trade groups: the American Coke and Coal Chemicals Institute and the Coke Oven Environmental Task Force.
