This report provides the economic impacts associated with this proposed standard. We provide economic impacts for six different regulatory options considered for the proposal. Two of these options will be proposed as part of this standard. The impacts in this report are estimated based on comparisons of annualized compliance costs to the revenues for affected firms. We find that the impacts of these options are generally minimal to small businesses except for the most stringent scenario (known as Regulatory Option 6), and that large businesses should experience cost savings for the most part. We find that small firms are 66 percent of the businesses affected under each of the options considered in this analysis. These impacts range from only 5 firms (4 small) out of 281 (186 small) having some positive cost to sales estimate for the least stringent option (known as Regulatory Option Scenario 1) to 146 firms (124 small) that have some positive cost to sales estimate, with 8 small firms out of these 124 having annualized compliance costs of greater than 3 percent of sales. For the proposed options, Regulatory Option Scenarios 3 and 4, the impacts range from 9 firms (6 small) that have some positive cost to sales estimate to 38 firms (32 small) that have a positive cost to sales estimate. There is no significant economic impact on a substantial number of small entities (or SISNOSE) under either of the proposed options.

Project officer: John L. Sorrels. August 2006. EPA-452/R-06-006.