Abstract |
Within the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response (OSWER) is responsible for the development and management of a national program to safely handle solid and hazardous waste. The national program, for the most part, is authorized by the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA). The Hazardous Waste Data Management System (HWDMS) was developed to automatically track the status of permits, reports, inspections, enforcement activities, and financial data to assist EPA in managing the data generated by RCRA. As with many computer systems, HWDMS has outgrown its capabilities, so a new system is needed. The new system is called the Resource Conservation and Recovery Information System (RCRIS). The goal of the RCRIS system is to provide a more effective means for tracking hazardous waste handlers regulated under RCRA. RCRA Notification, Permitting, and Compliance Monitoring and Evaluation data is available through the National Technical Information Service (NTIS) on IBM compatible tapes. From now until HWDMS is completely archieved, there will be two data tapes from NTIS. There will be a tape for HWDMS and a separate one for RCRIS. The HWDMS tape will include data from all States and Territories, except for Mississippi and general enforcement data, sensitive information is not included. |