On January 14, 2015, Judge Thomas O. Rice of the Eastern District of Washington ruled that the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act could apply to manure used, stored and managed at a dairy in the Yakima Valley, holding that the dairy “discarded” manure so as to make it a solid waste under the statute. Granting in part the environmental citizen group plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment, the court further found that the dairy’s discarding of manure (and conversion of that manure’s constituents to nitrate) means that Cow Palace is contributing, or has contributed, to the handling, storage and treatment of solid waste that may cause an imminent and substantial endangerment to human health or the environment, and that the dairy’s discarding of manure contaminated an underground drinking water source so as to violate RCRA’s ban on open dumping. This ruling, the first in which a federal district court has applied RCRA to the handling of dairy manure, comes on the heels of hotly contested litigation and may have profound impacts to the dairy industry in Washington and beyond.
Background and Overview
As a backdrop, this case is one of four RCRA citizen suits brought by several environmental citizen groups against four family-owned dairies in Washington’s Yakima Valley. The plaintiffs asserted that the dairies’ manure-handling practices were responsible for nitrate contamination in the surface and groundwater downgradient from the dairies, which in turn was causing exceedances of nitrate levels in drinking water sources.
Before the plaintiffs brought suit, the dairies had already been the main focus of an EPA report issued in September 2012 relating to potential sources of nitrate contamination in the Yakima Valley. Although the dairies disputed many of the findings in the EPA report, they entered into a 2013 Administrative Order on Consent with the EPA under the Safe Drinking Water Act. Under the AOC, the dairies committed to thoroughly investigate (and address, if necessary) the effect of various specified manure handling practices may have had on the groundwater in the Valley. Among other things, the dairies agreed in the AOC to sample and monitor the fields on which the dairies applied manure to grow crops like corn and triticale, and adjust their application practices if necessary, and to test lagoons in which the...
