338
Opinion of the Court
the meaning of" Subtitle C. This provision, in contrast to § 3001(i), provides a complete exemption by including the term "generating" in its list of covered activities. "[I]t is generally presumed that Congress acts intentionally and purposely" when it "includes particular language in one section of a statute but omits it in another," Keene Corp. v. United States, 508 U. S. 200, 208 (1993) (internal quotation marks omitted). We agree with respondents that this provision "shows that Congress knew how to draft a waste stream exemption in RCRA when it wanted to." Brief for Respondents 18.
Petitioners contend that our interpretation of § 3001(i) turns the provision into an "empty gesture," Brief for Petitioners 23, since even under the pre-existing regime an incinerator burning household waste and nonhazardous industrial waste was exempt from the Subtitle C TSDF provisions. If § 3001(i) did not extend the waste-stream exemption to the product of such a combined household/ nonhazardous-industrial treatment facility, petitioners argue, it did nothing at all. But it is not nothing to codify a household waste exemption that had previously been subject to agency revision; nor is it nothing (though petitioners may value it as less than nothing) to restrict the exemption that the agency previously provided—which is what the provision here achieved, by withholding all waste-stream exemption for waste processed by resource recovery facilities, even for the waste stream passing through an exclusively household waste facility.4
4 We express no opinion as to the validity of EPA's household waste regulation as applied to resource recovery facilities before the effective date of § 3001(i). Furthermore, since the statute in question addresses only resource recovery facilities, not household waste in general, we are unable to reach any conclusions concerning the validity of EPA's regulatory scheme for household wastes not processed by resource recovery facilities.
Page: Index Previous 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007