Action Alerts

Don’t let the EPA weaken coal ash safeguards

What's At Stake

For more than a century, coal companies have dumped billions of tons of their toxic coal ash into leaking ponds, landfills, and ground pits across the country.  

After decades of fighting, the Environmental Protection Agency finally established and strengthened coal ash regulations, but now they want to let polluters off the hook. Trump’s EPA is moving to gut these hard-won protections that safeguard our water, health, and communities from this dangerous waste. We cannot let that happen. 

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Coal ash is the toxic waste left behind after burning coal for electricity. It contains hazardous chemicals like arsenic, lead, chromium, and radium, substances linked to cancer, reproductive failure, neurological damage, and other serious health harms.  

Across the country, coal ash is contaminating groundwater at nearly every coal plant site: At 91% of plants, water is polluted above federal safety standards. Yet instead of enforcing the law, the EPA is proposing to weaken it. 

In 2015, after Earthjustice took the EPA to court, the agency adopted the first-ever federal safeguards for coal ash. But those rules left out massive amounts of coal ash. Loopholes for older dumps at retired and inactive sites allowed companies to avoid cleaning up an estimated 2 billion tons of coal ash. After years of litigation and pressure from impacted communities, the EPA finally extended the safeguards to hundreds of previously unregulated dumps in 2024.  

Earthjustice has defended these protections in court and will do so again as they come under attack. The coal industry has spent years delaying and evading its responsibility to clean up its toxic sludge. Before the Trump administration’s EPA was in place, companies submitted a wish list asking for weaker rules, including permission to leave coal ash sitting in groundwater. 

The EPA’s new proposal would grant those wishes by weakening or eliminating key safeguards that require plant operators to measure pollution and clean up contaminated sites. The result? More toxic waste leaking into drinking water, rivers, lakes, and streams. 

Coal ash pollution falls hardest on working class communities and communities of color. These families are already dealing with contaminated water, toxic dust, and ongoing health risks while companies try to walk away from the mess they created. 

The EPA is supposed to protect people and enforce the law. It should not give polluters a pass. 

Tell the EPA: Do not let coal companies off the hook for toxic pollution.

Industrial coal ash site with large gray mounds of waste, a conveyor structure overhead, and barren, brown terrain under a cloudy sky.
Uncovered mountain of coal (L) and ashes (R) at the AES Power Plant facilities in Guayama, P.R., on August 10, 2025. The company produces power for the island by burning coal. For years, the neighboring communities have fought against the company’s practice as their daily lives are upended due to the smell, coal dust, ashes in their homes and health side effects. The plant was scheduled to close in 2027, but the island’s governor, Jenniffer González Colón, extended the deadline until 2032. (Erika P. Rodriguez for Earthjustice)

60 Days Remain

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Your Actions Matter

Your messages make a difference, even if we have leaders who don't want to listen. Here's why.

You level the playing field.

Elected officials pay attention when they see that we are paying attention. Read more.

They may be hearing from industry lobbyists left and right, but hearing the stories of their constituents — that’s your power.

Our legislators serve at the pleasure of the people who gave them their job — you.

Make sure your elected officials know whose community and whose values they represent. When you contact your elected official, you’re putting a face and a name on an issue.

Whether or not you voted for them, they work for you, for the duration of their term.

Make sure your elected officials know whose community and whose values they represent. (Find your local, state, and federal elected officials.)

Your action is with us in court.

If a federal agency finalizes a harmful action, the record of public comments provides a basis for bringing them into court. Read more.

Throughout each of the public comment periods we alert you to, Earthjustice’s attorneys are researching and writing in-depth, technical comments to submit — detailing how the regulation could and should be stronger to protect the environment, our communities, and our planet.

We need you to join us — your specific experiences, knowledge, and voice are crucial to add to the Administrative Record through the comment periods.

Lawsuits we file that challenge weak or harmful federal regulations rely on what was submitted during the comment period. The court can only look at documents that are in the Administrative Record — including the public comments — to decide if the agency did something improper.

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It’s the law.

Federal agencies must pause what they’re doing and ask for — and consider — your comment. Read more.

Many of us may have never heard of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), but laws like these require our government to ask the public to weigh in before agencies adopt or change regulations.

Regulations essentially describe how federal agencies will carry out laws — including decisions that could undermine science, or weaken safeguards on public health.

Public comments are collected at various points throughout the federal government’s rulemaking process, including when a regulation is proposed and finalized. (Learn about the rulemaking process.) These comments become part of the official, legal public record — the “Administrative Record.”

When the public responds with a huge outpouring of support for environmental protections, these individual messages collectively undercut politicians' attempts to claim otherwise.

What this means is each of us can take a role in shaping the rules our government creates — and ensuring those rules are fair and effective.