It’s hard enough for employers to cope with hundreds of new regulations passed each year, but now agencies are adding insult to injury by imposing standards that are impossible to meet.

Case in point: Cellulosic ethanol.

Cellulosic ethanol is made from wood waste, crop stalks — even municipal waste. The idea was to create a biofuel that used waste products and didn’t take farmland out of production.

The federal government provided grants and loans to producers and imposed mandates on oil companies to blend cellulosic fuel into conventional gasoline. The mandate was 100 million gallons by 2010, 500 million in 2012 and 10.5 billion gallons a year by 2020.

At the time, nobody produced cellulosic ethanol. Today, that’s still the case – despite $1.5 billion in taxpayer grants and loans, no one has been able to commercially produce cellulosic ethanol.

Nevertheless, the Environmental Protection Agency penalizes refineries for not using cellulosic ethanol in their gasoline.

Of course, the federal government doesn’t have a monopoly on such regulations.

Seattle’s new paid sick leave policy applies to any business with five or more employees — even if that business isn’t located in Seattle.

The new law says that, if one or more of your employees spends more than 240 hours a year in Seattle on business, you must pay them pro-rated benefits.

For example, if you operate a flower shop in Kent and deliver bouquets in Seattle, you must keep track of how long each driver was inside the city limits. Have an out-of-state tech company or sales firm that regularly sends people to Seattle? You have to track their time as well.

This rule is a record-keeping nightmare visited on overwhelmed employers already struggling in these tough times.

If you faced a paperwork and legal nightmare just for having your employees briefly do business in Seattle, what would you do? In a time when local governments should be doing everything they can to encourage and attract more business, this does just the opposite. The city’s new ordinance might be better called the “Stay out of Seattle” law.

Don Brunell is the president of the Association of Washington Business.