Denell Washington '02

Environmental Protection Agency

This January I interned with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the Office of Policy, Economics and Innovation. Within in this office there are a number of divisions. I worked in the Innovative Pilots Division. There are two main projects that this division works on, Project XL and ECOS. Both types of projects incorporate some type of innovative technology. This may entail anything from policy changes to new pollution prevention technology. During my internship I gathered information on both projects under the banner of ECOS and Project XL. ECOS stands for Environmental Council for the States. It is an EPA and State program created to "Pursue Regulatory Innovation" (http://www.epa.gov/reinvent/ecos/). This program was instate because states felt as though the implementation of XL projects was taking to long. Project XL is a "national pilot program that allows state and local governments, businesses and federal facilities to develop with EPA innovative strategies to test better or more cost-effective ways of achieving environmental and public health protection. In exchange, EPA will issue regulatory, program, policy, or procedural flexibilities to conduct the experiment" (http://www.epa.gov/projectxl/file2.htm).

For Project XL I gathered information from the Final Project Agreement for 15 projects identifying the commitments of the sponsors and the companies involved in the projects. Once that information was gathered in proceeded to enter that information into a concise table of commitments. I also created a fact sheet that had all the vital information of the projects. This information included sponsors, location of the site, contacts, and other project information.