EPA Implements Stricter Regulations for Coal Ash Landfills and Power Plants.

The Biden administration has proposed expanding the number of coal waste dumps that would be subject to environmental oversight, a decade after a string of toxic disasters from such landfills flooded valleys and polluted rivers in southern states. The Environmental Protection Agency now wants to end exemptions that left about a quarter of the roughly 1,000 coal ash dumps nationwide exempt from federal regulation. Coal ash contains toxic substances such as mercury, cadmium, chromium and arsenic, and its pollution often hurts poor and minority communities near dump sites that the EPA says is already “overburdened by pollution.”