News Releases from Headquarters › Land and Emergency Management (OLEM)

EPA's Hazardous Waste e-Manifest System Receives One Millionth Manifest: Saving Industry and States Significant Time and Money

Contact Information: EPA Press Office (press@epa.gov)

WASHINGTON (March 13, 2019) — Today the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is announcing a significant achievement in modernizing the nation’s cradle-to-grave hazardous waste tracking process, saving valuable time, resources and dollars for industry and states.

In June 2018, EPA transitioned from a paper-intensive tracking process to an electronic system, known as “e-Manifest.” By the end of February, over 1 million electronic manifests have been submitted by industry and state users. EPA estimates that e-Manifest will ultimately reduce the burden associated with preparing shipping manifests by between 300,000 and 700,000 hours, saving state and industry users $75-$90 million annually, once electronic manifests are widely adopted.

“Reaching one million manifests is a tremendous milestone for EPA’s e-Manifest system,” said EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler. “I encourage more state and industry users to adopt e-Manifest to track off-site shipment of waste and reap the benefits of cost savings and reductions in paperwork.”

The agency’s hazardous waste tracking system helps to ensure that all federally regulated hazardous waste is handled in a way that protects public health and the environment from the point where it is generated, through its transportation routes, to the place of final treatment, storage or disposal. Every year, over six million shipments of hazardous waste crisscross the United States – moving from manufacturing sites to the waste management companies that safely treat, store and dispose of the waste. For over 30 years, the process of tracking these shipments was done using a cumbersome six-copy paper form. Under the paper system, the amount of paper generated during one month of traffic would exceed the height of the Washington Monument. Because these manifests are now housed in EPA’s e-Manifest system, regulated entities no longer need to store and distribute this paper.

The agency’s e-Manifest system currently receives about 5,000 hazardous waste manifests a day and generates more than $1 million in fees each month to support the system. Additional benefits of the e-Manifest system include:

accurate and more timely information on waste shipments;

rapid notification of discrepancies or other problems related to a shipment;

creation of a single hub for one-stop reporting of manifest data for use by EPA and states;

increased effectiveness of compliance monitoring of waste shipments by regulators; and

the potential for integrating manifest reporting with Resource Conservation and Recovery Act biennial reporting process and other federal and state information systems.

To learn more about e-Manifest, visit www.epa.gov/e-Manifest