May 2001 University Reporter

By Joe Peters

Government regulations can paint with a broad brush, not always accounting for the intricacies of a particular industry or even how one set of laws works with another. In the late 1990s, spurred in part by news of fines levied against other schools, a consortium of New England colleges and universities began to examine environmental regulations as they applied to university laboratories.

“Across the country the regulations were being enforced differently, and many colleges and universities were being fined large sums of money for noncompliance,” explains UMass Boston’s Environmental Manager Zehra Schneider Graham. “The real reason for the noncompliance, in our opinion, was that the regulations that were designed for industry did not fit.”

As a founding member of the consortium, UMass Boston joined a pilot program of the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), known as Project XL. The program offers colleges and universities the opportunity to develop alternative ways of meeting regulatory goals.

Judging by the EPA’s recent first-year audit of UMass Boston’s practices, the campus and the program are working well.

“The UMass Boston environmental management standard program has made substantial progress in its first year of implementation and further enhancements during the coming year will add to a program that has already shown significant accomplishments,” the audit concludes.

UMass Boston, Boston College, and the University of Vermont are the three schools from the Consortium for Environmental Excellence participating in the program.

One of the aspects of the program is it has allowed the university’s Environmental Health and Safety (EHS) Department to make lab rules more consistent. For example federal EPA regulations and those of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) could differ about how to handle particular processes or materials.

This program allows for changes to ensure regulatory compliance while also making it easier for students, staff, and faculty to follow the rules. In addition, Schneider Graham says the EHS is trying to raise general environmental awareness and promote pollution prevention.

The pilot phase has two more years. At that point, the EPA will decide whether to keep the program, modify it, or end it.

The EPA audit noted that those who use the laboratories and UMass Boston’s EHS staff appear to be working well together. Schneider Graham says this reflects the level of involvement in the program — some 160 individuals have taken part in training classes since October 2000.

“We have had faculty, staff and students participate in the development of the project all along so there is a sense of cooperation and collaboration among all involved,” says Schneider Graham.

EPA Gives University High Marks