Report on toxic releases needs revision

The government's storehouse of information on hazardous wastes has expanded far beyond the expectations of those who launched the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) reports 14 years ago. Like much of government, the TRI listings have grow exponentially with each passing year.

This year, at least 37,000 industrial facilities — some 6,400 more than just two years ago, including factories, power plants and mining operations in Utah — filed TRI reports with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Mandated by the 1986 Emergency Preparedness and Community Right-to-Know Act, the TRI reports provide annual data on releases of about 600 toxic chemicals into the air, water and land and serves as an "environmental report card" for affected industries.

Admittedly, the inventory has accomplished some good. In Utah, regulators and the media scrutinize the data for "polluters." Publication of the TRI has spurred some corporate managers to lower their emissions and "green up" their operations. But as important as TRI could be in helping people living near industrial facilities to learn about the release of hazardous emissions in their communities, the data does not address important risk factors, such as the relative toxicity of released chemicals.

As more and more states are learning, large releases of low toxic chemicals are viewed by some as alarming, while small releases of highly dangerous chemicals, like cancer-causing benzene and complex organic chemicals, may be ignored. In truth, chemicals vary greatly in their toxicity; an ounce of one chemical can be more dangerous than a ton of another chemical.

Moreover, the number of chemicals that reporting industries must now account for has grown 12-fold since 1987. The sheer size of the present inventory now confuses rather than informs people about what is and what isn't a serious risk. The dramatic expansion of the TRI reports leads to information overload and apathy and makes it difficult to identify vital safety issues. Furthermore, many of the substances now included in the inventory are addressed by other federal environmental statutes, particularly the Clean Air Act, and do not belong in the TRI. The tendency is for citizens to focus on total annual release quantities and not recognize the real health and environmental quality problems.