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The Bush administration continues its attacks on enviromental protections in the US and now it is going to remove most of the public's right to know about toxic releases by companies. Ironically, it was Bush's father who signed the law in 1989 saying that citizens had a right to know what toxic substances companies were releasing into the air and water.
A Smaller Right-To-Know?
EPA plans to reduce reports to every other year, allow more facilities to submit less information
Cheryl Hogue
Every year, companies across the U.S. calculate their annual releases of hundreds of toxic chemicals to air, water, and land, sending these data to the Environmental Protection Agency. As required by the Emergency Planning & Community Right-to-Know Act, EPA amasses this Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) information and makes it public.
In September, EPA announced plans to lighten industry's load for reporting TRI data. One of the two planned changes-the one that has perhaps sparked the most controversy-is to shift annual TRI reporting to an every-other-year cycle. The other proposed modification has to do with how much information must be provided to EPA and the public by facilities that handle or release relatively small amounts of toxics.
The modifications EPA seeks are the result of a two-year investigation into reducing the amount of effort that companies have to expend on TRI reports. The agency calls its plans “burden reduction,” a bureaucratic term for achieving fewer or less complicated regulations by trimming paperwork requirements.
Since 1989, chemical manufacturers and other businesses each year have reported to EPA information about their releases of hundreds of chemicals that are deemed toxic. Through the years, EPA has expanded TRI data collection to cover more industries and more chemicals. The most recent addition took effect with submissions for 2000, when the agency began requiring reports for chemicals, including mercury compounds and dioxins, that are persistent, bioaccumulative, and toxic (PBT).
Environmental groups are decrying EPA's new plans for altering TRI reporting. “It boggles my mind that they would want people to be less informed,” says Thomas E. Natan, research director for the National Environmental Trust, an activist group.
“TRI has been a bedrock of public safety information,” says Sean Moulton, senior policy analyst with OMB Watch, a watchdog group that keeps tabs on federal regulatory policy and information access. “EPA is essentially willing to get rid of information, extremely useful information, just to reduce burden,” Moulton says. TRI, he says, “hasn't put any companies out of business.”
Many in industry, including two major chemical manufacturing trade groups, are backing the planned changes.
“The overall burden of the system has dramatically increased” over the years, says Michael P. Walls, managing director of the American Chemistry Council. He says ACC is “very encouraged by EPA's announcement” on TRI. For years, the industry group has urged the agency to reduce industry's burden of reporting TRI information while maintaining the quality of this database, he adds.
“Reforming and streamlining reporting requirements and other regulatory burdens is critical if we want to balance the public's right-to-know with the need for chemical manufacturers to have the resources necessary to compete in the global market,” says Joseph Acker, president of the Synthetic Organic Chemical Manufacturers Association.
For EPA to change the frequency of TRI reporting, the Emergency Planning & Community Right-to-Know Act requires the agency to notify Congress at least one year and no more than two years before it proposes a rule to do so. In a Sept. 21 letter to Congress, EPA Chief Information Officer Kimberly T. Nelson outlined the agency's rationale for switching to alternate-year, also called biennial, reporting.
“Not only would alternate-year reporting result in significant burden reduction for covered facilities” and help EPA meet goals under the Paperwork Reduction Act, Nelson wrote, but the public would benefit, too. EPA could use savings in years when facilities do not report information to improve the TRI database and conduct additional analyses, she explained. For example, EPA could examine TRI information for “sector- or chemical-specific patterns of waste management, innovations in pollution prevention, and risk implications of toxic chemical releases,” explained Nelson, who is also the agency's assistant administrator for environmental information.
Walls says ACC suggested in 1999 that EPA consider alternate-year reporting for TRI, though he says the concept did not originate with the chemical industry group.
Edwin L. Mongan III, global environmental stewardship leader for DuPont, says alternate-year reporting wouldn't necessarily reduce his company's TRI activities. Nonetheless, DuPont supports burden reduction by EPA, especially in “mature” programs such as TRI, Mongan says.
If EPA changes to biennial reporting, DuPont would probably continue to collect and release this information annually, he says. The company uses TRI data internally, he says. Plus, its employees, some investor groups, environmental groups, and communities around DuPont facilities expect to find TRI and other waste and emission information updated each year on the company's website, he tells C&EN. DuPont is committed to being transparent about its environmental performance, Mongan continues. This is part of the corporation's commitment to excellence in environmental stewardship and sustainable growth, he adds.
Moulton says releases of TRI data have become expected of many companies. Many businesses have poured money into reducing their pollutant releases-and TRI helps to quantify the impact of those investments, he says.
Although some companies such as DuPont may continue to release TRI data on their own, Moulton says communities shouldn't have to depend on the “generosity” of businesses to get annual information on environmental releases.
Chemical manufacturers have filed TRI reports since 1989, Walls notes, and collectively have cut their releases 65% since then. Now, chemical producers are reaching the technical limit on reductions, especially when they are seeking to increase productivity, he says. If a chemical maker's TRI releases aren't significantly different from year to year, Walls wonders if that company really needs to make annual submissions to EPA.
Indeed, EPA says the change to an alternate-year reporting is justified because TRI numbers have remained steady for years.
Moulton says this may be true on a nationwide basis, but “at the community level, you see major changes year to year-and communities need to know that.”
Facilities often have TRI figures that rise significantly during one year-and then return to a historic average-because of a one-time activity. This often includes maintenance-replacement of an aging boiler can boost TRI numbers for a single year-or a large shipment of hazardous waste that had been managed on-site, Moulton says.
Should EPA switch TRI to alternate-year reporting, Natan says facility managers likely would schedule equipment maintenance or off-site transportation of hazardous waste for a year when the release would not have to be reported. This would leave the public uninformed about these activities, he says.
Walls says a company reporting TRI numbers in alternate years may need to give public assurances that its year-to-year releases have had no significant change.
Natan of the National Environmental Trust has crunched numbers to test EPA's contention that TRI data vary little from year to year. He examined data from 2001 and 2003 and used the information to predict 2002 numbers. Then he compared these calculated results to the actual figures for 2002.
Natan found that the actual aggregated data for all TRI reports did not change significantly. On a facility-by-facility basis, however, more than half the numbers he calculated for 2002 were significantly lower or higher than actual data. Nearly three-quarters of the interpolated figures were off by at least 20% compared with the reported numbers, he says.
Overall, Natan's figures showed an overestimation of 800 million lb of some toxic releases and an underestimation of about 1 billion lb of other substances. According to EPA, TRI releases in 2002 totaled 4.7 billion lb.
These findings, Natan says, demonstrate the importance of maintaining yearly reports and the type of information that would be lost if TRI is made biennial.
In addition, Moulton says alternate-year reporting would affect a major use of TRI data: tracking trends, such as whether mercury releases are going down or whether discharges to water of TRI chemicals collectively are increasing. Because trend lines require at least three data points, alternate-year reporting would double the amount of time needed to identify them, he says.
The second of EPA's planned changes to TRI concerns the forms that facilities fill out to report their toxic releases. TRI numbers, like most personal income tax data, must be reported to the government on one of two forms: a long one or a short one. Most businesses that release chemicals to the environment file Form R, the long form.
A user of the shorter Form A provides information about the facility and lists the names of the TRI chemicals it handles or releases. Form R also includes the volume of those substances and describes whether the substances are released to air, water, or land. Carol L. Andress, policy analyst for Environmental Defense, calls Form A “the equivalent of no reporting” from the perspective of many who use TRI data.
Currently, a facility can file Form A if it handles less than 500 lb a year of TRI chemicals, with the exception of PBT substances. EPA is proposing to raise that threshold to less than 5,000 lb for materials that are not PBTs. The proposed change would affect about a third of all facilities that submit TRI reports, according to the agency, and collectively would save about 165,000 hours of work per year. According to Walls, this change would be significant to small facilities, including those operated by ACC member companies.
DuPont is not among them, however. “We've never used Form A,” Mongan tells C&EN.
Moulton says the proposed modification in Form A eligibility would “allow companies to pollute 10 times as much” before they have to inform the surrounding communities how much they release.
Natan wonders why EPA proposed this change, given that fewer than 40% of facilities now eligible to use Form A actually do so. “If you go to the trouble to figure [out that] you're eligible for Form A, you might as well do Form R,” he says. Plus, some facilities that could use the short form may file Form R instead to demonstrate to the public that they're not hiding any information, he suggests.
According to EPA, the proposed new threshold for Form A reporting would apply to about 1% of the billions of pounds of yearly toxic releases or transfers in the U.S. Although this proposal may not seem like much nationally, Natan says, it would reduce the amount of right-to-know data available for many communities.
The National Environmental Trust examined 8,927 zip codes in which there was at least one facility submitting a TRI report for 2003. If the Form A threshold is raised to 5,000 lb, numerical data on TRI substances would not have been required for any facility in 922 of those zip codes, Natan says. “All they would get is the names of the chemicals,” he says of TRI data users.
If the proposed reporting threshold change had been applied, 1,608 zip codes would lose data from at least half of the facilities that reported numerical data in 2003, he adds.
Some states would be more impacted by the Form A change than others, based on 2003 reporting numbers, Natan continues. Although nationwide about 10% of zip codes would lose all numerical data if eligible facilities switched from Form R to the short form, so would 21% of Utah's zip codes, along with 19% in Nevada and 17% each in Maryland and Massachusetts, he says.
As part of its planned changes, EPA also proposed to allow facilities that handle but do not release PBTs to file Form A. This proposal, however, would not apply to dioxins, which would continue to be reported on Form R.
Form A currently can't be used for substances classified as PBTs, including lead, mercury, dioxins, and polychlorinated biphenyls. The PBT chemicals have significantly lower yearly thresholds for triggering TRI reports under Form R, ranging from 100 lb for lead compounds to 10 lb for mercury compounds and 0.1 g for dioxins.
The agency says its proposal would allow many small facilities that handle lead but have no environmental releases to file the short TRI form. According to EPA, less than 1% of PBT waste management activities would be affected by this change. However, the agency did not suggest how many facilities it might affect.
Not surprisingly, environmental groups are also unhappy with this proposed trimming of right-to-know information. “These chemicals are so dangerous, even in small quantities,” Moulton says.
Meanwhile, EPA's plans, especially those for alternate-year reporting, seem at odds with previous pronouncements by the Bush Administration on TRI. For instance, on March 4, 2002, White House regulatory “czar” John D. Graham wrote to EPA encouraging the agency to expedite the release of TRI data. Graham, administrator of the Office of Management & Budget's Office of Information & Regulatory Affairs, expressed concern that the 2000 TRI data were not released until the spring of 2002. Affecting the “practical utility” of data, he explained, is its timeliness.
Nelson replied in a March 28, 2002, letter that TRI “continues to be one of our most-used publicly available data resources. We recognize the importance of providing timely data to the public.”
In addition, EPA in 2003 released a report describing the widespread usage of TRI data by governments, businesses, academics, and the public at large (https://www.epa.gov/tri/guide_docs/2...tausepaper.pdf).
Natan points out that many programs within EPA use the information collected in the inventory. Before the agency makes TRI biennial, it would have to demonstrate that the change would have no adverse effect on EPA's use of this data, he says.
Environmental activists hope that a public outcry will help halt EPA's plans to cut back on the volume and frequency of right-to-know information.
“To take such a successful program and tear it to shreds doesn't make sense,” Moulton says.
Chemical & Engineering News
ISSN 0009-2347
Copyright © 2005
EPA plans to reduce reports to every other year, allow more facilities to submit less information
Cheryl Hogue
Every year, companies across the U.S. calculate their annual releases of hundreds of toxic chemicals to air, water, and land, sending these data to the Environmental Protection Agency. As required by the Emergency Planning & Community Right-to-Know Act, EPA amasses this Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) information and makes it public.
In September, EPA announced plans to lighten industry's load for reporting TRI data. One of the two planned changes-the one that has perhaps sparked the most controversy-is to shift annual TRI reporting to an every-other-year cycle. The other proposed modification has to do with how much information must be provided to EPA and the public by facilities that handle or release relatively small amounts of toxics.
The modifications EPA seeks are the result of a two-year investigation into reducing the amount of effort that companies have to expend on TRI reports. The agency calls its plans “burden reduction,” a bureaucratic term for achieving fewer or less complicated regulations by trimming paperwork requirements.
Since 1989, chemical manufacturers and other businesses each year have reported to EPA information about their releases of hundreds of chemicals that are deemed toxic. Through the years, EPA has expanded TRI data collection to cover more industries and more chemicals. The most recent addition took effect with submissions for 2000, when the agency began requiring reports for chemicals, including mercury compounds and dioxins, that are persistent, bioaccumulative, and toxic (PBT).
Environmental groups are decrying EPA's new plans for altering TRI reporting. “It boggles my mind that they would want people to be less informed,” says Thomas E. Natan, research director for the National Environmental Trust, an activist group.
“TRI has been a bedrock of public safety information,” says Sean Moulton, senior policy analyst with OMB Watch, a watchdog group that keeps tabs on federal regulatory policy and information access. “EPA is essentially willing to get rid of information, extremely useful information, just to reduce burden,” Moulton says. TRI, he says, “hasn't put any companies out of business.”
Many in industry, including two major chemical manufacturing trade groups, are backing the planned changes.
“The overall burden of the system has dramatically increased” over the years, says Michael P. Walls, managing director of the American Chemistry Council. He says ACC is “very encouraged by EPA's announcement” on TRI. For years, the industry group has urged the agency to reduce industry's burden of reporting TRI information while maintaining the quality of this database, he adds.
“Reforming and streamlining reporting requirements and other regulatory burdens is critical if we want to balance the public's right-to-know with the need for chemical manufacturers to have the resources necessary to compete in the global market,” says Joseph Acker, president of the Synthetic Organic Chemical Manufacturers Association.
For EPA to change the frequency of TRI reporting, the Emergency Planning & Community Right-to-Know Act requires the agency to notify Congress at least one year and no more than two years before it proposes a rule to do so. In a Sept. 21 letter to Congress, EPA Chief Information Officer Kimberly T. Nelson outlined the agency's rationale for switching to alternate-year, also called biennial, reporting.
“Not only would alternate-year reporting result in significant burden reduction for covered facilities” and help EPA meet goals under the Paperwork Reduction Act, Nelson wrote, but the public would benefit, too. EPA could use savings in years when facilities do not report information to improve the TRI database and conduct additional analyses, she explained. For example, EPA could examine TRI information for “sector- or chemical-specific patterns of waste management, innovations in pollution prevention, and risk implications of toxic chemical releases,” explained Nelson, who is also the agency's assistant administrator for environmental information.
Walls says ACC suggested in 1999 that EPA consider alternate-year reporting for TRI, though he says the concept did not originate with the chemical industry group.
Edwin L. Mongan III, global environmental stewardship leader for DuPont, says alternate-year reporting wouldn't necessarily reduce his company's TRI activities. Nonetheless, DuPont supports burden reduction by EPA, especially in “mature” programs such as TRI, Mongan says.
If EPA changes to biennial reporting, DuPont would probably continue to collect and release this information annually, he says. The company uses TRI data internally, he says. Plus, its employees, some investor groups, environmental groups, and communities around DuPont facilities expect to find TRI and other waste and emission information updated each year on the company's website, he tells C&EN. DuPont is committed to being transparent about its environmental performance, Mongan continues. This is part of the corporation's commitment to excellence in environmental stewardship and sustainable growth, he adds.
Moulton says releases of TRI data have become expected of many companies. Many businesses have poured money into reducing their pollutant releases-and TRI helps to quantify the impact of those investments, he says.
Although some companies such as DuPont may continue to release TRI data on their own, Moulton says communities shouldn't have to depend on the “generosity” of businesses to get annual information on environmental releases.
Chemical manufacturers have filed TRI reports since 1989, Walls notes, and collectively have cut their releases 65% since then. Now, chemical producers are reaching the technical limit on reductions, especially when they are seeking to increase productivity, he says. If a chemical maker's TRI releases aren't significantly different from year to year, Walls wonders if that company really needs to make annual submissions to EPA.
Indeed, EPA says the change to an alternate-year reporting is justified because TRI numbers have remained steady for years.
Moulton says this may be true on a nationwide basis, but “at the community level, you see major changes year to year-and communities need to know that.”
Facilities often have TRI figures that rise significantly during one year-and then return to a historic average-because of a one-time activity. This often includes maintenance-replacement of an aging boiler can boost TRI numbers for a single year-or a large shipment of hazardous waste that had been managed on-site, Moulton says.
Should EPA switch TRI to alternate-year reporting, Natan says facility managers likely would schedule equipment maintenance or off-site transportation of hazardous waste for a year when the release would not have to be reported. This would leave the public uninformed about these activities, he says.
Walls says a company reporting TRI numbers in alternate years may need to give public assurances that its year-to-year releases have had no significant change.
Natan of the National Environmental Trust has crunched numbers to test EPA's contention that TRI data vary little from year to year. He examined data from 2001 and 2003 and used the information to predict 2002 numbers. Then he compared these calculated results to the actual figures for 2002.
Natan found that the actual aggregated data for all TRI reports did not change significantly. On a facility-by-facility basis, however, more than half the numbers he calculated for 2002 were significantly lower or higher than actual data. Nearly three-quarters of the interpolated figures were off by at least 20% compared with the reported numbers, he says.
Overall, Natan's figures showed an overestimation of 800 million lb of some toxic releases and an underestimation of about 1 billion lb of other substances. According to EPA, TRI releases in 2002 totaled 4.7 billion lb.
These findings, Natan says, demonstrate the importance of maintaining yearly reports and the type of information that would be lost if TRI is made biennial.
In addition, Moulton says alternate-year reporting would affect a major use of TRI data: tracking trends, such as whether mercury releases are going down or whether discharges to water of TRI chemicals collectively are increasing. Because trend lines require at least three data points, alternate-year reporting would double the amount of time needed to identify them, he says.
The second of EPA's planned changes to TRI concerns the forms that facilities fill out to report their toxic releases. TRI numbers, like most personal income tax data, must be reported to the government on one of two forms: a long one or a short one. Most businesses that release chemicals to the environment file Form R, the long form.
A user of the shorter Form A provides information about the facility and lists the names of the TRI chemicals it handles or releases. Form R also includes the volume of those substances and describes whether the substances are released to air, water, or land. Carol L. Andress, policy analyst for Environmental Defense, calls Form A “the equivalent of no reporting” from the perspective of many who use TRI data.
Currently, a facility can file Form A if it handles less than 500 lb a year of TRI chemicals, with the exception of PBT substances. EPA is proposing to raise that threshold to less than 5,000 lb for materials that are not PBTs. The proposed change would affect about a third of all facilities that submit TRI reports, according to the agency, and collectively would save about 165,000 hours of work per year. According to Walls, this change would be significant to small facilities, including those operated by ACC member companies.
DuPont is not among them, however. “We've never used Form A,” Mongan tells C&EN.
Moulton says the proposed modification in Form A eligibility would “allow companies to pollute 10 times as much” before they have to inform the surrounding communities how much they release.
Natan wonders why EPA proposed this change, given that fewer than 40% of facilities now eligible to use Form A actually do so. “If you go to the trouble to figure [out that] you're eligible for Form A, you might as well do Form R,” he says. Plus, some facilities that could use the short form may file Form R instead to demonstrate to the public that they're not hiding any information, he suggests.
According to EPA, the proposed new threshold for Form A reporting would apply to about 1% of the billions of pounds of yearly toxic releases or transfers in the U.S. Although this proposal may not seem like much nationally, Natan says, it would reduce the amount of right-to-know data available for many communities.
The National Environmental Trust examined 8,927 zip codes in which there was at least one facility submitting a TRI report for 2003. If the Form A threshold is raised to 5,000 lb, numerical data on TRI substances would not have been required for any facility in 922 of those zip codes, Natan says. “All they would get is the names of the chemicals,” he says of TRI data users.
If the proposed reporting threshold change had been applied, 1,608 zip codes would lose data from at least half of the facilities that reported numerical data in 2003, he adds.
Some states would be more impacted by the Form A change than others, based on 2003 reporting numbers, Natan continues. Although nationwide about 10% of zip codes would lose all numerical data if eligible facilities switched from Form R to the short form, so would 21% of Utah's zip codes, along with 19% in Nevada and 17% each in Maryland and Massachusetts, he says.
As part of its planned changes, EPA also proposed to allow facilities that handle but do not release PBTs to file Form A. This proposal, however, would not apply to dioxins, which would continue to be reported on Form R.
Form A currently can't be used for substances classified as PBTs, including lead, mercury, dioxins, and polychlorinated biphenyls. The PBT chemicals have significantly lower yearly thresholds for triggering TRI reports under Form R, ranging from 100 lb for lead compounds to 10 lb for mercury compounds and 0.1 g for dioxins.
The agency says its proposal would allow many small facilities that handle lead but have no environmental releases to file the short TRI form. According to EPA, less than 1% of PBT waste management activities would be affected by this change. However, the agency did not suggest how many facilities it might affect.
Not surprisingly, environmental groups are also unhappy with this proposed trimming of right-to-know information. “These chemicals are so dangerous, even in small quantities,” Moulton says.
Meanwhile, EPA's plans, especially those for alternate-year reporting, seem at odds with previous pronouncements by the Bush Administration on TRI. For instance, on March 4, 2002, White House regulatory “czar” John D. Graham wrote to EPA encouraging the agency to expedite the release of TRI data. Graham, administrator of the Office of Management & Budget's Office of Information & Regulatory Affairs, expressed concern that the 2000 TRI data were not released until the spring of 2002. Affecting the “practical utility” of data, he explained, is its timeliness.
Nelson replied in a March 28, 2002, letter that TRI “continues to be one of our most-used publicly available data resources. We recognize the importance of providing timely data to the public.”
In addition, EPA in 2003 released a report describing the widespread usage of TRI data by governments, businesses, academics, and the public at large (https://www.epa.gov/tri/guide_docs/2...tausepaper.pdf).
Natan points out that many programs within EPA use the information collected in the inventory. Before the agency makes TRI biennial, it would have to demonstrate that the change would have no adverse effect on EPA's use of this data, he says.
Environmental activists hope that a public outcry will help halt EPA's plans to cut back on the volume and frequency of right-to-know information.
“To take such a successful program and tear it to shreds doesn't make sense,” Moulton says.
Chemical & Engineering News
ISSN 0009-2347
Copyright © 2005
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