Utah ranks 2nd for chemical pollution

Less is better, but 767.2 million pounds of pollution is still bad.

Utah environmental regulators are pleased with the latest annual report from the Environmental Protection Agency that reveals a 19 percent decline in the amount of chemicals released into Utah's air and land. It follows a nationwide decline.

But Utah continues to rank second in the United States for toxic chemicals released into the environment, behind Nevada and ahead of Arizona and Alaska.

It comes as no surprise to regulators in Utah.

"The bad news is we have a lot of releases," said Brent Everett, acting Superfund program manager for the Utah Department of Environmental Quality. "But we're in a mining area. And mining waste, in general, amounts to one-third of the total releases."

About 179 Utah companies reported releasing some 767.2 million pounds of toxic chemicals into the Utah environment in 2001, according to the EPA's annual Toxic Release Inventory, a national study of the amount of all toxic chemicals released by industry.

Utah and other Western states consistently rank at the top of the list because of the large amount of hard-rock mining. By federal definition, every time a mining company moves a ton of rock, it adds some toxic chemicals to the total because the rock also contains lead, arsenic and other byproducts of mining for gold, silver and copper.

Kennecott topped the charts in Utah with 695.9 million pounds of toxic chemicals, according to EPA's report. The Kennecott smelter also released another 27.8 million pounds.

As a result, Salt Lake County was ranked No. 1 among all counties in the country for toxic pollution.

Those numbers are misleading, company officials say, because they do not represent new toxic chemicals but simply natural rock moved from one site to another.

Because of a federal court ruling that mining byproducts are not reportable toxic wastes, Kennecott plans to file an amended report with EPA that will show its actual toxic releases at around 100 million pounds.

"The TRI is important to let people know what exists in their back yard," said Kennecott spokesman Louis Cononelos. "But when EPA added more and more reporting requirements, it somehow lost the impact of what its intent was. And this huge numbers game becomes meaningless to the public."

Now, with the recent court action that sided with the mining industry, Cononelos suspects future TRI reports will reflect a more accurate picture of pollutants into the environment.

U.S. Magnesium is still the nation's top chlorine polluter and ranks No. 3 in Utah. Yet the company continues to make significant improvements to reduce its chlorine emissions.