According to our recent conversation, it was recently discovered that a significant amount of medical waste has washed up on the shores of Lake Baltimore. This is quite disconcerting, since much of the state's annual revenue comes from businesses adjacent to the lake, including a large tourism sector: if this problem is not resolved quickly, I fear that the industries that rely on the beauty of the lake will suffer greatly. The Hopkins Attorney General informed me that, through a cooperative federalist model, our state has the ability to self-regulate national EPA statutes. This presents an opportunity to leverage the power of several EPA regulations to stop the release of medical waste into the lake as efficiently as possible. The Clean Air Act (CAA) began in the 1950s as a state-regulated statute, with several significant changes made over the past 60 years. The last major amendment, in 1977, reformed how outdoor air quality is regulated in the United States, establishing a list of six chemicals that are rigorously monitored through the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS ) and a much longer list of hazardous air pollutants (HAPS) that have varying levels of regulation. Because of the rigorous media expertise that can be regulated by the CAA, I don't think this law is our best route to preventing the release of medical waste into Lake Baltimore - the CAA only regulates outdoor air quality and has no impact on water pollution. That said, the CAA enforces standards for medical waste incineration; Regulation through this method of waste disposal may allow us to prevent future environmental disasters impacted by hospitals' need to dispose of large quantities of medical waste. There... middle of paper... chemicals were released into Lake Baltimore, contained in medical waste, the EPA would know and we could get this information through a FOIA investigation. Finally, the ability to file a lawsuit by a citizen, acting as a private attorney general, would allow us to know who dumped medical waste into Lake Baltimore. This provision was originally created by the CAA and CWA; its purpose is to address the inadequacy of environmental law enforcement at the state level. We have the ability to sue a federal agency that fails to fulfill its statutory duties or a private organization that has violated environmental laws. By filing a civil lawsuit and using joint liability, we could pit each of three potential violators against each other, so that they all have to prove their innocence or face potential environmental penalties for the infraction..