Date to be announced soon
A 2-hour webinar
As California’s Governor Jerry Brown once said during a presidential campaign decades ago to explain California’s unique, complex, and strict environmental requirements: “West is West and East is East.” That admission, not necessarily an explanation, emphasizes the dilemma even worse today faced by national corporations consistently finding themselves out of compliance in California and suffering substantial penalties and loss of public confidence.
This webinar is intended to show corporate EH&S managers, corporate counsel, consultants, and managers how to improve their compliance or sustainability audits of California facilities, operations, and products to avoid environmental calamities, as illustrated by the following recent examples:
- Introduction to and how to find environmental laws, regulations, agencies, and enforcement procedures; design pro-active responses, including audits, and ensuring their confidentiality.
- WalMart - $27 million settlement of hazardous waste violations with San Diego County District Attorney as lead for 20 other jurisdictions.
- Georgia Pacific Chemicals - $24 million penalty to Sacramento County Environmental Management Department (CUPA) for wastewater/hazardous waste violations.
- Cemex California - $2 million penalty to U.S. EPA to settle New Source Performance Standard violations at a cement plant.
- Mattel and Other Toy Manufacturers - $1.8 million settlement with California Attorney General for Proposition 65 violations (failure to warn about lead in toys).
- Unilever Corporation - $1.3 million penalty to California Air Resources Board for excess VOC content in consumer deodorant products.
- Angelus Sanitary Can Machinery Corp. - $240,000 penalty to U. S. EPA for failure to comply with Toxic Release Inventory reporting.
In addition to the above cases, U.S. EPA announced its annual enforcement results for 2009 as $5 billion in settlements from California facilities, including penalties, other expenses, and abatement costs. This represents a significant increase over the 2008 results—$1.7 billion.
Important questions that will be addressed during this webinar include:
- What are the key differences in California environmental regulations compared to the comparable U.S. EPA rule followed in most other jurisdictions? For example, EPCRA, RCRA, Clean Air Act.
- What are the important state regulations that have no federal counterpart?
- How should environmental audits be conducted to discover California nuances?
- How should audits in California be performed to assure confidentiality in view of the fact there is no environmental audit privilege statute in this state?
- When is it appropriate to disclose environmental violations to federal and/or state officials?
These and other important questions will be answered during the program and in the webinar CD.
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