They will define "treatment" as rendering any waste from a higher level of hazard to a lower level of hazard in order to facilitate disposal.
They will concede that the facility is allowed the use of the material first in one, high performance application, and then, subsequently in several, increasingly lower performance applications. They will tacitly acknowledge that this is a good and proper implementation of a pollution prevention technology.
But, in fact, the EPA only recognizes pollution prevention at all because Congress has forced them to. They really hate pollution prevention because it screws up their Accounting Principles 101 approach to regulation. They love the command and control approach to regulations and pollution prevention starts messing around with that.
The Agency will first claim that, at some point the solvent becomes unusable, even for the least demanding of the cleaning applications. Then they will claim that this otherwise unusable residue, therefore, by definition, has become hazardous waste.
At that point, they will say, the company must treat the material as hazardous waste and begin the paperwork chain to account for it.
Futher, they will claim that, even though the residue may not have manifested a hazardous condition at the time of its disposal, it was hazardous at the point that it became unusable.
Then, they will administer the coup-de-grace, as they demonstrate that evaporation of the solvent was a hazardous waste treatment method employed by the company, and, ipso-facto, they were treating the hazardous waste so they could didpose of it, at a reduced ignitability hazard, as ordinary waste.
The EPA is a criminal enterprise!
My friend, who makes his living in environmental compliance, thought that the EPA had absolutely no case on the waste dumping charge since there was no waste. He said they were setting him up on a "Title V" charge for the VOC evaporation, assuming that the quanitities were enough. Apparently, it doesn't matter how much solvent you actually used, only the "theoretical" amount that you "could" have used.
My friend rattled off all the applicable regulations, and frankly, my eyes glazed over. Example: It makes a difference whether you are wiping down a machine with a solvent for "maintenance" or "repair" or "some other use".
Cutting through all the BS, what we have here is a case of a bureaucracy making an example of what happens to a small business owner who doesn't show the proper respect. That's it, plain and simple.