EPA making changes to toxics reporting

The EPA has been passing under the radar recently what with all the scandals and the mess in Iraq. But take a look here.

EPA recently announced plans that would essentially dismantle its Toxic Release Inventory (TRI), the nation's premier tool for notifying the public about toxic pollution. The TRI annually provides communities with details about the amount of toxic chemicals released into the surrounding air, land, and water. The information enables concerned groups and individuals to press companies to reduce their pollution, resulting in safer, healthier communities. Despite the program's widely hailed success, however, EPA is proposing to significantly rolling back the program's reporting requirements.

The EPA has proposed three changes, each of which would dramatically cut information available to the public on toxic pollution. The agency is proposing to:

• Move from the current annual reporting requirement to every other year reporting for all facilities, eliminating half of all TRI data;
• Allow companies to release ten times as much pollution before being required to report the details of how much toxic pollution was produced and where it went;
• Permit facilities to withhold information on low-level production of persistent bioacculuative toxins (PBTs), including lead and mercury, which are dangerous even in very small quantities because they are toxic, persist in the environment, and build up in people's bodies.

These proposals are part of EPA efforts to reduce the amount of paperwork companies must file. In seeking to reduce the reporting burden on industry, however, EPA has been aggressively pursuing major changes to the TRI program with little consideration of the vital information communities will lose under these changes. Many public interest groups have asserted that the TRI program does not impose any excessive or unnecessary burden on companies.