Toxic pollution rose 5% in 2002

WASHINGTON — The volume of toxic pollutants released into the environment in the United States rose 5 percent in 2002, the first increase since 1997, the government reported Tuesday.

Those two years are the only ones to show an increase since the Environmental Protection Agency began keeping track of the billions of pounds of pollution under a 1986 law. In 1997, the increase was 6 percent, according to EPA figures.

Even with the most recent rise — a dramatic turnaround from the 13 percent decline in 2001 — environmentalists say the EPA is still letting industry underreport the amount of air pollution by 330 million pounds a year.

"It's time that the EPA and the states deal with the problem of inaccurate and flawed reporting of toxic releases," said Kelly Haragan of the Rockefeller Family Fund's Environmental Integrity Project.

Some 4.79 billion pounds were released in 2002, the latest for which figures are available, not including releases from metal mining, the EPA reported. The agency stopped including that data because of a recent court decision in an industry challenge.

EPA spokeswoman Cynthia Bergman said Congress never intended the inventory to be all-inclusive of all types of emissions and chemicals. The annual Toxics Release Inventory "is one of just several tools we have to provide the public with data on chemical emissions and releases," she said.

The EPA began releasing the TRI piecemeal, earlier than planned, in response to criticism by Haragan's group and the Galveston-Houston Association for Smog Prevention in Texas.

Kimberly Terese Nelson, the EPA's chief information officer, blamed the "extraordinarily large change" in the pollution trends on the 1999 shutdown of BHP Copper Co.'s San Manuel plant in Tucson, Ariz., where 2,000 people worked. Dismantling a plant turns components and product into waste.

"If we were take that one facility out we would see a 3 percent decrease," she said of the releases of 650 chemicals by 24,379 facilities that EPA tracks. Last year, 25,388 facilities reported their findings.

The agency reported a 10 percent increase in releases of mercury — which Nelson blamed on a single gold mine — and a 3.2 percent increase in releases of lead.