A district court held that a paper company that sold "broke," a byproduct of its manufacturing process, to paper recyclers was not an arranger under CERCLA for PCB contamination in a river. The company lacked knowledge that broke could be hazardous; it invested money and labor in treating, sorting, ...
The Third Circuit denied petitions for review under NEPA challenging the FAA's approval of an expansion project at the Philadelphia International Airport. The FAA prepared an EIS and conducted an air quality analysis to meet the overlapping requirements of NEPA and the CAA, and EPA submitted comment...
The Third Circuit held that a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers complied with NEPA, the CWA, and the CZMA in its decision to deepen the main channel of the Delaware River by five feet. The Corps' 2009 EA was neither arbitrary nor capricious. The Corps complied with the procedural requirements prescribed ...
A district court held that the U.S. Forest Service violated NEPA, but not the NFMA, in approving the use of herbicides to control invasive plant species in the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest. The Wallowa-Whitman National Forest comprises 2.3 million acres in the northeast corner of Oregon and the w...
A district court vacated and remanded BLM's resource management plan and EIS for the Roan Plateau Planning Area in Colorado. BLM considered a number of alternatives in its NEPA analysis, but ultimately decided to permit the leasing of 100% of the plateau for oil and gas drilling subject to vario...
The Ninth Circuit reversed in part and affirmed in part a lower court decision that U.S. Forest Service complied with NEPA and the APA when it amended the Sierra Nevada forest plan in 2004. In stark contrast to the 2001 EIS, which contained a 64-page detailed analysis of the environmental conseq...
The Fourth Circuit held that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineer violated NEPA when it issued a CWA §404 permit allowing a developer to build a mooring facility and boat ramp 3,000 feet from the Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge in Virginia Beach, Virginia. The Corps' EA, issued contemporaneously w...
The Third Circuit vacated as moot a lower court decision that dismissed a contractor's third-party complaint against Pennsylvania and the commonwealth's natural resources agency for cleanup costs associated with Quehanna Wild Area Nuclear Site. The contractor argued that the lower court erred by...
The D.C. Circuit vacated NRC rulemakings concerning the temporary storage and permanent disposal of spent nuclear fuel. Four states, an Indian community, and a number of environmental groups filed a petition for review challenging NRC's "waste confidence decision" (WCD), which, among other thing...