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On Aug. 2, EPA's Kathy Blanton, who replaced O'Leary, e-mailed to industry attorney William M. Guerry Jr. the "language we have put together to address the laundries' concerns," according to a copy of the e-mail obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
Guerry wrote back on Aug. 15 with proposed changes, documents show. Among them was deletion of a phrase in the preamble stating that shop towels "remain regulated." Instead, the lobbyist wanted the words "regulatory status . . . remains unchanged."
Guerry, in an interview, said the change was important to make sure that states did not misread the rule as a significant change in policy. Otherwise there would have been "chaos" and a "train wreck," he said. EPA officials shared the language with him, he said, because "they recognized that we had the expertise they needed."
Blanton said she sent Guerry just part of the regulatory language. "I can see how, from the outside, that it would look like colluding or something. [But] these were the people who were going to be most affected by the rule and they were the ones with the expertise." She said at this point the EPA had already had sufficient input from the paper towel people and others affected by the rule.
Opponents, including the union, environmentalists and paper towel makers, say they were not given an advance look at the language. Ralph Solarski, a Kimberly-Clark Corp. executive who chairs a task force of paper towel makers, said his group would have been glad to have one.
"Kathy Blanton and Bob Dellinger at EPA were asked on multiple occasions for advance copies and we were consistently denied," Solarski wrote in an e-mail to The Post.
EPA officials attended two industry meetings to discuss the proposed rule, one in Baltimore on Aug. 20 and one in Old Town Alexandria on Sept. 12. On Aug. 30, Farmer donated $250,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
EPA's Office of Solid Waste Director Dellinger spoke at the Alexandria meeting. His comments later appeared in the trade group's magazine: "EPA doesn't want to make this onerous."
Instead of screw-on, sealed containers for transporting contaminated woven towels from factories to laundries, which were proposed in 2000, Dellinger said, a piece of plywood over a barrel would meet the new EPA proposed standard.
Also, the EPA opted not to require the towels to be wrung out. "The point of that is not to make it harder to do than what you would do through your normal course of business," Dellinger said.
However, he told the group, the paper towel industry would have to wring out its towels to make sure they had no more than five grams of solvent on them before being dumped.
The new proposed rule was published in the Federal Register on Nov. 20, 2003.
Paper industry officials say that the EPA is ignoring its own studies showing that laundries create 30 percent more waste than paper towels in the form of sludge -- lint, debris, toxics and other substances extracted from laundry wastewater -- sent to municipal landfills.
"This is a case study," Solarski said, "for how an industry has used the regulatory process to gain a market advantage."
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