Chemical Manufacturers Association (CMA)
The Environmental Protection Agency has made changes to the Toxics Release Inventory every year since 1987, adding and deleting specific chemicals. Beginning in 1991, the Pollution Prevention Act greatly expanded the reporting requirements to include examples of source reduction and an accounting of TRI chemicals that are generated as byproducts and recycled, recovered for energy or treated.
The chemical industry, through the Chemical Manufacturers Association, supported the TRI and many of the changes. Some, in fact, were made at the request of industry or of individual companies. CMA member companies, represent more than 90 percent of the basic industrial chemical production in the US.
Now EPA is considering changes to the Toxics Release Inventory that would substantially alter its composition and purpose. EPA is adding 286 chemicals and chemical categories to the TRI and has proposed expanding the number of sectors that must report. The agency is considering adding materials accounting and occupational demographics to the TRI, and extending the "33/50" program.
The chemical industry questions these changes. There is little consideration of the direct and indirect costs of compliance. In some cases, the intent is not risk reduction, an agreed-upon goal, but chemical use reduction. The sum of the changes is to reduce the effectiveness of the TRI and give undue weight to special interests that do not represent the political consensus.
The Environmental Protection Agency has recently added 286 chemicals and chemical categories to the Inventory, almost doubling the list. The problem with this wholesale addition is that it does not discriminate between chemicals that are truly toxic and chemicals that might be suspected or slightly toxic. In particular, the addition of categories lumps the innocuous with the hazardous and, in CMA's judgment, goes beyond the Agency's statutory authority.
The upshot is to compromise the usefulness of the TRI as an engine of risk reduction. Furthermore, wholesale additions weaken the TRI as a barometer of progress. As it is, yearly comparisons by EPA and CMA do not reflect annual additions and deletions, and EPA has proposed to use two different base years for different sets of chemicals in future comparisons.
Waiting in the wings are almost 40 other chemicals and chemical categories that EPA wishes to add to the TRI. These include criteria air pollutants, already regulated under the Clean Air Act, whose emissions dwarf the present inventory. EPA also proposes to expand the reporting sectors to include electric utilities, mining, warehousing and waste, management.
EPA has estimated the direct cost of TRI reporting to be just over $6,000 per chemical per facility in the first year and just under $3,000 in subsequent years. The agency estimated that the aggregate costs of compliance were $100 million initially and $50 million a year afterwards. CMA feels these estimates are low by a factor of six, since they do not include indirect costs. Listing a chemical on the TRI triggers a host of piggyback requirements in local, state and other federal regulations.
EPA is also considering the addition of materials accounting and occupational demographics data to the Toxics Release Inventory. Occupational demographics include workplace monitoring and information about employee exposure to chemicals, which already are regulated by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
Materials accounting, or mass balance, would require companies to report every pound of raw material brought into a facility or process and every pound of product or waste that goes out. The agency claims this is necessary to track pollution prevention progress. CMA's position is that mass balance measures chemical use, not pollution prevention. While mass balance might reduce chemical use, it would not necessarily prevent pollution, the intent of the law. In fact, it could discourage pollution prevention efforts, such as recycling, that did not reduce chemical use.
And materials accounting could diminish the competitiveness of US companies by revealing trade secrets and dampening innovation...without a concomitant increase in public safety. Risk is related to exposure, but use is not a valid surrogate for exposure.
Moreover, current community right-to-know regulations already require that hazardous chemicals stored on industrial sites be reported to state emergency response commissions, local emergency planning committees and local fire departments.
The Environmental Protection Agency intended to exempt from TRI reporting those facilities that release low volumes of toxic chemicals. The idea was to provide regulatory relief for companies and to reduce the administrative burden of maintaining the TRI without compromising the quality of the data. However, in its final rule the Agency based the exemption not on releases and transfers but on "total waste, generated."
The Chemical Manufacturers Association feels this defeats the purpose of the exemption. Few facilities will take advantage of such an alternate threshold because of the risks of non-compliance and the costs of annual certification. A "total waste" threshold creates perverse reporting consequences by equating recycling, energy recovery and treatment with waste. For example, a CMA member company uses a lead and antimony alloy in manufacturing aircraft parts. The facility releases only 5 pounds of lead and 5 pounds of antimony each year, but it recycles 690,000 pounds of lead and 120,000 pounds of antimony. These chemicals would not qualify for an exemption.
The definition of waste is a point of contention between EPA and industry. The agency has yet to clearly define a waste stream under the Pollution Prevention Act and, even if it does, CMA does not feel that "total waste generated" is a real-world baseline to measure pollution prevention. It bears no relation to risk reduction, which industry believes is the objective of environmental control.
Industry met the goals of the 33/50 program -- voluntarily to reduce releases of 17 priority chemicals -- ahead of time, and EPA is considering whether to extend this approach to a next generation program. CMA believes that voluntary efforts work best when individual companies determine their own goals within a framework established in cooperation with EPA. If EPA chooses to establish a national compilation or round-up of industry voluntary goals, it should be done within existing programs. CMA is opposed to targeting specific chemicals or classes of chemicals and to mandating specific reductions. Instead individual company goals should focus on risk reduction through cutting chemical releases and wastes that pose genuine hazards.
This represents a departure from present regulatory practices. EPA's own Science Advisory Board has indicated that the Toxics Release Inventory is not a suitable vehicle for risk management. The Board feels that the reporting information has been misused and has led to misdirected pollution prevention efforts. Factoring risk assessment and economic analysis would insure more effective protection of the environment and public health.
Last Updated: March 5, 1996