Barry Wolff, Charleston Steel & Metal Co.’s vice president and general manager, has been buying Superfund Recycling Equity Act (SREA) reports through ISRI since they became available in the early 2000s. The company was at one point part of a battery cleanup. “To us, it makes sense to take all the precautions and do all the due diligence we can to avoid problems going forward,” explains Wolff, president of ISRI’s Southeast Region.
The SREA Reasonable Care Compliance Program is an important and highly valuable ISRI member benefit. It provides members the opportunity to obtain compliance reports on consuming facilities they do business with, protecting them from potential future liability, should a facility be named a Superfund site and the member a Potentially Responsible Party (PRP). The SREA report contains a concise, user-friendly facility evaluation along with supporting backup data gathered from searching over 1,200 federal, state, and local databases; FOIA requests; and facility questionnaires.
These reports normally cost upwards of $1,000 each, but ISRI buys them in bulk and sells them to members for only $50. Since 2019, ISRI has made SREA reports available to nonmembers for $400. Beginning in 2022, the member price will go up $25 per report to $75. Nonmembers will pay $425. KERAMIDA, the environmental consulting firm that compiles the reports for ISRI, is increasing the fees it charges the association.
Jim Wiseman, chair of ISRI’s SREA Subcommittee and executive vice president of Smart Recycling Management, says the value SREA reports provide is worth keeping in mind. “Members who buy these reports obviously buy them because (1) they understand the importance of [reports] and what they do for them as a risk management and a business management tool, and (2) we all want to be as thrifty as we possibly can, and those people who buy [reports] on a yearly basis know that ISRI sells them at a tremendously, tremendously deep discount compared to what it would cost if they went out and bought them on their own,” he says.
At the recent Fall Meetings in Charleston, S.C., Wiseman reported orders for SREA reports surpassed 2020 numbers in the first half of this year and are expected to meet or exceed the 2020 total. The SREA Committee has set a goal of selling 5,900 reports in 2022.
“We used to order these reports on our own before they were offered as a benefit of our ISRI membership and our cost was 7-8 times higher,” states Matt Kripke, CEO of Kripke Enterprises Inc. in Toledo, Ohio. “We value the cost savings we receive from ISRI. More importantly, we order these reports to protect us and our suppliers from future liabilities.”
The program leadership has held two educational webinars this year with Q&A sessions to help members understand SREA reports. You can view the first webinar here, and the second here. In addition to exhibiting at the recent Southeast Region Conference and Trade Show in Charleston, SREA reports will be shown at the ISRI2022 Convention and Expo in Las Vegas.
For more information on SREA reports, contact Rebecca Andrechak, ISRI staff attorney, at (202) 662-8522 or email. For a tutorial on ordering reports, login using your ISRI member credentials.
Photo courtesy of Storyblocks.
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