Last year MIT paid $550,000 in fines to the federal government for mishandling hazardous waste—even though the government never said any pollution had occurred.

The problem, MIT officials say, was not a chemical mess but a bureaucratic one.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the federal agency charged with overseeing how industries and researchers dispose of dangerous chemicals, slapped the university with the fines last April.

It was an “administrative and procedural” glitch involving mislabeled containers of hazardous waste, says William VanSchalkwyk, an MIT environmental safety official.

As the EPA in recent years has cracked down on hazardous waste infractions at academic institutions, officials at universities have begun to question whether the rules are justified. At a recent meeting convened by the National Institutes of Health, environmental safety officials began to rethink the kinds of rules that cost MIT half a million dollars.

The EPA rules, which were developed in the 1980s with industrial waste production in mind, are “extremely burdensome to [academic] research,” VanSchalkwyk says.

The problem for academic institutions, he says, is that, while industries produce train car-sized containers of a few types of waste, research institutions produce thousands of containers of waste in small quantities. And labelling the various kinds of waste is a time-consuming process, say VanSchalkwyk and his counterparts at other institutions.

“The EPA makes no distinction between a coffee cup and a 10,000 gallon tank of waste,” according to H. Joseph Griffin, director of environmental health and safety at Harvard. “They’re all held to the same standard.”

Griffin says the EPA relies on stringent “command and control” regulations that make numerous, specific requirements—down to the exact font that must be used to label hazardous chemicals.

But in all the details, he says, the EPA’s regulations neglect the larger issue of communicating “the hazards of the chemicals to a layperson.”

According to officials at institutions like Harvard and MIT, the National Academy of Sciences has maintained for years that federal environmental regulations place undue burdens on academic researchers. But they say only recently have their criticisms found a receptive audience with policymakers in Washington D.C.

For example, a policy report on waste management commissioned by Congress and issued last fall by the Maryland-based Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) offered an alternative to the EPA’s “industry-oriented” regulations, says Emmett Barkley, the institute’s director of laboratory safety.

And nearly four years ago, Barkley adds, Congress asked the National Institutes of Health to begin identifying issues that “burden research”—and the cost of waste management ended up high on that list.

Harvard was one of ten research institutions that participated in the HHMI study, which argues for a less stringent approach to waste management at universities.

The institute specifically picked Harvard to participate in the study because of its “excellent record in environmental stewardship based on innovative training efforts,” Barkley says.

For instance, seven years ago Harvard introduced an on-line training program to make sure researchers and lab staff knew how to comply with federal hazardous waste regulations. Last year nearly 1,200 Harvard affiliates took the on-line training course, Griffin says.

Several years ago, biotech companies began springing up in Cambridge and along Route 128, a major highway that circles Boston. Many of the firms maintain with close ties to researchers at educational institutions in the Boston area. As ties between universities and biotech companies grew closer, the EPA “singled out” academic institutions and began cracking down on their hazardous waste violations, Barkley says.

In 1999, for example, the EPA fined Boston University $753,000 for spilling fuel and other violations.

According to EPA officials, the agency is carefully studying the HHMI report and doing its own research on whether its hazardous waste rules are appropriate for academic settings.

“We’re looking at it seriously, and we’re running our own concurrent experiment here,” says Joshua Secunda, a senior official in the EPA’s northeast regional office.

The EPA’s own research project, called Project XL, involves implementing new hazardous waste management standards on an experimental basis at three New England schools: Boston College, the University of Massachusetts at Boston, and the University of Vermont.

Generally, the EPA does not take part in research projects, so Secunda says this experiment is an unusual step for the agency.

The EPA hopes to use the research to revise its hazardous waste rules so they “harmonize with the practical considerations of academic research,” he says.