© Oxford University Press 2006.
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Changes Proposed for Reporting Chemical Spills
On December 3, 1984, 90,000 pounds of methyl isocyante gas leaked from a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, and killed 3,800 people and injured thousands more. This release, followed by a smaller Union Carbide plant leak that injured 150 people in West Virginia, led the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to create the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI)—a database to which industries report chemical spills and other hazardous releases.
The TRI is widely credited with reducing chemical releases by 65%. However, companies and EPA alike are chafing under TRI paperwork—which generates some 90,000 forms a year, each taking an average of 25 hours to complete, according to TRI Program Director Mike Flynn.
Under current TRI reporting requirements, releases of production-related wastes that exceed 500 pounds must be documented both in terms of their amounts and their chemical identities. But in its "TRI Burden Reduction Proposed Rule," issued in October 2005, the EPA seeks to raise that threshold to 5,000 pounds. Should the rule pass, companies would have to document only the identity of chemicals released under the new threshold—not the amounts. What's more, in a separate initiative, the EPA announced its intention to change TRI reporting requirements from an annual to a biannual basis.
Critics have blasted the changes, claiming they will deprive communities of valuable information about environmental threats. "Why in the world do we want less data?" asked Michael Harbut, M.D., who heads the Center for Occupational and Environmental Medicine at the Barbara Ann Karmonos Cancer Institute, in Royal Oak, Mich. "These changes might reduce paperwork for the multibillion dollar petrochemical industry but at the cost of an increased cancer burden among the American public."
The EPA's Flynn responded that the goal is to reduce the paperwork burden while maintaining a sufficient flow of information to communities. "These changes won't affect the environmental standards that are already in place at the federal, state, and local level," he emphasized. "The proposals have produced thousands of comments that help us understand what the public does with TRI data," Flynn added.
The comment period on the proposed rule closed on January 13. Flynn said the agency would make its decision on both threshold changes and biannual reporting by the end of the year.
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