The most common activity associated with environmental regulations in a maintenance shop setting is the storage of hazardous waste. What comes in second? Quite probably the cleaning of metal parts with solvents.
Certainly, many spent solvents are a hazardous waste. In fact, you may even have found that the release of vapors from parts-cleaning equipment affects your air-quality permits. You might be interested to know that there are environmentally friendly products on the market that don't contain chlorinated solvents. In other words, they eliminate your need to comply with certain environmental regulations--and often they work just as well as more hazardous products! Another idea is to modify your working procedures, to significantly reduce the amount of hazardous waste you generate from parts cleaners.
To get the whole story on these and other ideas--as well as environmental regulations--continue through this activity area. You may also refer to the following link for more information on pollution prevention:
http://www.epa.gov/p2