RCRA Biennial Reporting System for Hazardous Waste

About the Data

Selects a report that will give data on all facilities in a geographic area, such as a state, city, or county.
Example: You want to know about all facilities in College Park, MD.

Facility

Facility: Selects a report that will give you data on a particular facility.
Example: You are interested in the Rhone Poulenc plant in your town.

Industry

Industry: Select a report that will give data on all facilities in a particular industry, as defined by a SIC code.
Example: You want to know about all facilities in the primary metals industry in the U.S.

Generated Waste

Gen-waste: Select a report that will give data on all generated waste streams that have certain characteristics.
Example: You need to find all generators of wastes containing cyanide.

Offsite

Rcv-waste: Select a report that will give data on all received waste streams (received from off-site).
Example: You need to find all receivers of corrisive wastes in your county.

Area Search

Area reports are intended to help you find out about all facilities within a geographic area - a zip code, city, county, or state. A state must be entered; in addition, none or many of the zip code, city, and county fields can be chosen in each search.

Facility Search

Facility reports are intended to help you find information about a single facility, over one or more years. You can select the facility by specifying its name or facility id. Names of facilities will often change from year to year, but the names of the cities that they are located in generally do not. Fill in only the first letter of the facility name if you're not sure how it's spelled. If you also fill in the city and state, you will be likely to find the facility that you want.

Industry Search

Industry reports are intended to help you find all facilities that have a particular SIC code, or industrial classification. You can specify the facilities you want by SIC code, state, and year. Note that although many facilities produce more than one kind of product, and have more than one SIC code. This report lets you search only on the first or primary SIC code.

Waste Generated Search

These reports let you find individual wastes, so each section (between two pairs of dotted lines) in the output will represent a waste, not a whole facility. The amount of detail given for each waste is greater than in the other reports.

You can select which wastes you want by filling in one or more of a number of codes or by searching the free-form waste description. The first code (EPA Waste Code) is the most reliable, but each waste can have up to 25 of these codes.

Waste Received Search

City and County Fields

Fill in the name of the county or city that you want - do not fill in the word "county" after counties. Some submissions have their county or city misspelled; others have two varient spellings for the same city or county. For instance, the city of St. Louis can be spelled either ST. LOUIS or SAINT LOUIS. If you think this may be a factor, you can either run your search twice or use "*" to represent any characters. In the case above you could enter "S*LOUIS" and find both spellings. Watch out for FORT/FT., SAINT/ST., and MOUNT/MT.

Level of Detail Field

This field selects the level of detail you want in your report:

LOW: : The report will produce a header of basic facility information for each facility. This information includes name, address, EPA ID and SIC codes. This level of detail should be used if all you want is a facility list.
HIGH: : The report gives all the data that LOW would plus a listing of the wastes generated and received for the facility. HIGH detail searches for large or industrialized geographic areas can take a long time.

If you need more detail then can be found through this High detail report, try the BRS Form Query (currently available only via telnet), which shows all BRS data fields.

Output Type Field

This field selects what output style your report will have:

Text: The report will produce human-readable ASCII text.
Comma-delimited ASCII: The report will produce a table of data with the columns separated by commas. Character fields will by surrounded by double quotes so that any commas in them won't be read as column delimiters. This style of output is suitable for loading into a database such as Dbase.
Tab-delimited ASCII: The report will produce a table of data with the columns separated by tabs. This style of output is suitable for loading into databases such as Excel.

EPA Facility ID Field

BRS facilities are assigned facility ID codes by EPA. These IDs are supposed to remain constant for a facility from year to year, even if the facility is sold or changes its name. The EPA IDs are 15 character codes that combine both letters and numbers. If you suspect that you can't find info on a facility because its name has changed, you can try searching by EPA ID. To get its ID in the first place, you will have to run a Standard Report which finds it either in one of the BRS years or in the Master report. Then, you can copy down the EPA ID and fill it in on this screen. If you do search by EPA ID, you shouldn't fill in anything for the facility name or city.

Facility Name Field

Fill in the facility name in this field if you know it.

Warning! Facility names are often misspelled when submitted to EPA. In addition, many facilities change their names from year to year. For these reasons, enter as few letters as are necessary to specify the facility, followed by a "*" to represent any number of letters. This will help you find the facility even if its name changes or is misspelled. Example: You want to find a Du Pont facility. Possible spellings of facility name:

DU PONT CO.
E. I. DU PONT DE NEMEURS
DUPONT
DU PONT MICHIGAN PLANT

If you entered "DU PONT" into the name field, you wouldn't have found any of these spellings. On the other hand, if you entered "DU PONT*", you would have found spellings 1 and 4. To find all of these you would need to enter "*DU*PONT*". If you're not very sure of the facility name it is often better to leave this field blank and get a list of all facilities in the city that your facility of interest is in.

State Field

If you wish to search on the entire US, select the "ALL" value for this field.

Year Field

The BRS database currently has information for the reporting years 1989, 1991, 1993, 1995, and 1997. To search through all years, select the ALL value from the selection list. There is currently no way to select only two or three years, although this can be implemented if many users want it.

SIC Field

SIC codes are 4-digit numbers that represent specific industries. More general industrial categories are represented by the first 2 digits of the SIC codes. For instance, "Primary production of aluminum" is SIC code 3334, in the category 33, "Primary Metal Industries". You can fill in either a 4-digit or 2-digit code in this field; if you fill in a 2-digit code the program will automatically add a "*" to the end of it to find all 4-digit codes that start with those digits.

Waste Description Field

Reporting facilities identify their wastes with a free-form waste description. You can search for a word or phrase in this description by filling in this field. If you want to search for a word at the beginning or the description, type in a * (wildcard) after the word; if you want to search for a word in the beginning, middle, or end of the description then type a * both before and after the word.

Zip Code Field

Fill in the zip code for the area that you want. If you fill in a 5-digit zip code, the program will automatically put a "*" after it. The "*" represents any number of characters and will let your search find 9-digit zip codes that start with the 5 digits you entered. Don't fill in dashes.
Example:
If you enter 20740*
this will find

20740
207401122
207403465
etc.

The Biennial Reporting System (BRS) is one of EPA's primary tools for tracking the generation, shipment, and receipt of hazardous waste. It contains information from the Hazardous Waste Reports that must be filed every two years under the RCRA program. RCRA (the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act) is the Federal statute that regulates the generation, treatment, storage, disposal, or recycling of solid and hazardous waste. Facilities must report their activities involving hazardous waste to BRS if they fulfill one of two criteria:

They are a Large Quantity Generator (LQG) of waste, or
They treated, stored, or disposed (TSD) of RCRA hazardous waste on site in units subject to RCRA permitting requirements.

The definition of Large Quantity Generator is complex, but a simplified version is any site that generates more than 2,200 lbs of RCRA waste in a single month, accumulates more than 2.2 lbs of RCRA acute hazardous waste in any single month, or accumulated more than 220 lbs of spill cleanup material contaminated with RCRA acute hazardous waste in any month.

Not all hazardous waste is reported within BRS. Some waste that might otherwsie be considered hazardous is exempted from regulation within RCRA as part of the original legislation. Some waste treatment units, particular wastewater treatment units, are not regulated under RCRA but instead under other environmental statutes. However, BRS appears to be the best U.S. hazardous waste tracking database available.

Note that RCRA hazardous waste quantities are traditionally reported in tons (2000 pounds). Direct comparison of BRS and TRI waste quantities is difficult since TRI reports on quantities of chemical components while BRS reports on quantities of wastes (which may contain many different hazardous and non-hazardous components). For instance, if 500 pounds of lead dust was spilled onto 3 tons of soil, and this soil was shipped offsite to a landfill, then this would be reported as a transfer of 500 lbs of lead under TRI and as a shipment of 3 tons of lead-contaminated waste under BRS.