Departments
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Week of 23 April 1999 |
Vol. II, No. 32 |
Feature
Article
OEHS grows to keep pace with University's environmental needs
By Eric McHenry
In less than a decade, the Office of Environmental Health and Safety (OEHS) has become a significant administrative presence at Boston University, growing from a handful of troubleshooters in the early '90s to a team of approximately 20 specialists today.
Peter Schneider, director of EHS, and his staff have recently codified their office's expanded role with a comprehensive policy manual that addresses every major aspect of environmental health and safety at BU, from EHS management structure to workplace and laboratory safety to pollution prevention. It includes a prefatory statement of commitment from President Jon Westling, which outlines its focal points and is the foundation for its policies. The manual will be distributed to all deans, directors, and department heads, and Schneider encourages other members of the BU community to obtain copies by contacting OEHS. Implementation of the manual, he says, is everyone's responsibility.
"In order to successfully address environmental health and safety issues, everybody in the organization has to be invested," says Assistant Provost Michael Field. "If people don't care, it's not going to work. It's not a matter of calling up some company to haul off our paper waste every now and again for recycling. If we really want to have an effect on the environment, everyone at the University needs to be environmentally conscious."
The OEHS is within the jurisdiction of the provost and is overseen by a University-wide panel comprising various administrative higher-ups who review and evaluate its policies. The office's expansion has been made necessary in part by increasing government vigilance where environmental and occupational safety are concerned. In 1997, the University paid a $253,000 cash penalty and undertook two Supplemental Environmental Projects (SEPs) in connection with the settlement of an enforcement action brought by the EPA and the U.S. Department of Justice for alleged violations of the Federal Clean Water Act and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act: two oil spills and improper storage of some chemicals. One of the SEPs, a storm water runoff management effort, will be completed by the end of the year. The other, restoration of a public garden in Roxbury, was finished last summer.
"Right now, I think the University is in a particularly good place with respect to its environmental health and safety program," Schneider says. "We are not only meeting all the deadlines and doing what this consent decree requires of us, we're going beyond it."
The policy manual is one example of the extra effort to which he refers. Additionally, the University recently purchased a sophisticated chemical inventory system for its laboratories.
"Last summer," says Schneider, "we inventoried over 40,000 containers. Now they each have a label with a bar code, and it's all tied into a computer software system that is easily linked to material safety data sheets."
Such a system, he says, allows EHS more effectively to monitor and manage chemicals at the University, watch for chemical sharing opportunities between labs that could reduce unnecessary inventory, and make critical information readily available to hazardous materials experts in emergencies.
Earlier this month, BU joined four other area academic institutions and several businesses in the Clean Charles Coalition, which with awareness and cleanup efforts will support a fishable and swimmable Charles River by 2005. Its constituents have already endorsed a conference on storm water management as one of its first major undertakings. Such an event, Schneider says, would provide an excellent platform from which BU could share information about the runoff control techniques it has been developing in cooperation with the Charles River Watershed Association (CRWA) as part of one of the SEPs.
Storm water is inherently a pollution problem, and urban storm water is especially bad. Boston's storm water, however, is distinctly troublesome because in many places it competes with sanitary waste for space in the city's antiquated sewer system, and the resulting spillover ends up in the Charles. BU connected with CRWA, a private, nonprofit environmental group that has been campaigning for a cleaner river since 1965, to seek ways of reducing both the amount of sewer-bound storm water on and around campus and the levels of sediment in that water. The partnership intends to employ several control techniques, which might include increased street sweeping, installation of filters, and channeling runoff into open space with highly permeable soil and hardy vegetation.
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Peter Schneider Photo by Kalman Zabarsky |
"We had some interesting projects that we were just dying to have funded, and this was our favorite one," says CRWA Project Director Kathy Baskin. "By next fall we'll be testing the water up-stream and downstream of these devices to see how well they remove pollution."
The University's other SEP involved restoration of a community garden in the Frederick Douglass Square neighborhood of Roxbury, and was undertaken in cooperation with the South End/ Lower Roxbury Open Space Land Trust. Workers removed a foot of contaminated topsoil, fully 353 tons of earth, and replaced it with two feet of compost and loam. Rededicated last summer, the Bessie Barnes Memorial Garden features raised planting beds accessible to community members who are confined to wheelchairs.
Known as "the mayor of Greenwich Street," Bessie Barnes was a Roxbury activist who created the community garden in the 1970s. It had fallen to neglect in the intervening years and was covered with scrap wood and other debris prior to the restoration.
"One of the EPA's focal points is environmental justice," says Brett Boskiewicz, an EHS regulatory compliance officer who oversaw the garden restoration. Loosely defined, he says, "environmental justice" means making sure that areas with a low tax base don't get the short end of the environmental stick as a result.
"You don't want people putting major transportation facilities or waste disposal facilities right next to underprivileged neighborhoods just because they can," he says. "With this SEP, we realized that we had a perfect opportunity to work toward environmental justice. By funding this project, BU really helped out in an area that probably wouldn't have gotten the attention it needed otherwise."
To obtain a copy of the new Environmental Health and Safety Policy Manual, call OEHS at 353-4094. If you're on the MED campus and would like a copy, call 638-8830. For more information, visit the EHS Web site at www.bu.edu/EHS.