http://www.epa.gov/records/what/quest6.htm

A Records Sched­ule (sched­ule) con­sti­tutes the EPA’s offi­cial pol­icy for records and infor­ma­tion reten­tion and dis­posal. The sched­ule pro­vides manda­tory instruc­tions for what to do with records (and non­record mate­ri­als) no longer needed for cur­rent Agency busi­ness. Records reten­tion and dis­posal should occur at reg­u­lar inter­vals in the nor­mal course of busi­ness of the Agency.

Other ben­e­fits of using the EPA Records Sched­ules are:

1.

Ensures that the impor­tant records are orga­nized and main­tained in such a way as to be eas­ily retrieved and iden­ti­fi­able as evi­dence of the pro­grams activ­i­ties (espe­cially in the event of an audit, a FOIA request or a dis­cov­ery for a law­suit).
2.

Con­serves office space and equip­ment by using fil­ing cab­i­nets to house only active records.
3.

Saves money by the reg­u­lar trans­fer of inac­tive files to less costly Fed­eral Record Cen­ter (FRC) stor­age areas for sub­se­quent dis­po­si­tion.
4.

Helps pre­serve those records that are valu­able for his­tor­i­cal or research pur­poses.
5. Sta­bi­lizes the growth of records in offices through sys­tem­atic dis­po­si­tion of unneeded records.

Each Fed­eral Agency is required by statute (36 CFR 1224) to main­tain a com­pre­hen­sive records sched­ule. This com­pre­hen­sive sched­ule is devel­oped by com­bin­ing the Gen­eral Records Sched­ules (con­tain­ing dis­posal author­ity for records com­mon to sev­eral or all agen­cies), pub­lished by the National Archives and Records Admin­is­tra­tion, with EPA-specific sched­ule items or record series.

Based on care­ful analy­sis of the Agency’s doc­u­men­tary mate­ri­als, the sched­ules pro­vide instruc­tions for the reten­tion and dis­po­si­tion of each record series or sys­tem and of non­record mate­ri­als, and autho­rizes the sys­tem­atic removal of unneeded records from offices.