EPA halts tracking hazardous waste from Mexico

The U.S. EPA has eliminated funding for Haztraks, a database that tracks hazardous waste shipped from Mexico into the United States. The loss of Haztraks is a serious strike against right-to-know efforts and a significant step backward for some international agreements, academics and environmental officials say.

From 1995 to 2002, Haztraks reported on the amount and kinds of hazardous waste, such as heavy metals and solvents, shipped into the United States from maquiladoras, or foreign-owned manufacturing plants in Mexico, most of which have U.S. owners. It also noted where the waste was treated or disposed, says Marc Mowrey, hazardous waste coordinator at EPA’s Region 9.

Under both Mexican law and the binational 1983 La Paz agreement, waste generated by the 3200 maquiladoras in Mexico must be shipped back to the country where the legal owner is based. Now that Haztraks is defunct, state agencies will still collect waste manifests for each shipment, but the information will be harder to analyze, Mowrey says. Mexican laws require some reporting, but the laws are frequently ignored by companies and not enforced by the government. Data are not submitted or stored electronically; permission to view the data is tough to obtain.

EPA operated Haztraks with its own staff and contract workers who were paid $250,000 per year, Mowrey says. Beginning on October 1, the budget for contract work for waste management at EPA Region 9 was cut to $1.4 million, less than half of the $3 million approved for 2000. “We had to make choices about what got funded, and Haztraks didn’t stand up to other essential functions,” he said.

“EPA headquarters should pick up funding for Haztraks because more than 80% of maquiladoras are headquartered in the U.S.,” says Kathryn Kopinak, a sociologist at King’s University College at the University of Western Ontario. Maquiladoras generate roughly 98% of all the hazardous waste produced along the border, which speaks to the interest of U.S. federal authorities in keeping track of it, she explains.

“In the absence of effective chemical right-to-know programs in Mexico, Haztraks was very important to academics and nongovernmental programs,” Kopinak adds. Using Haztraks, Kopinak discovered that Asian-owned companies had tripled waste generation in Tijuana. She also found that the largest amounts of waste were produced in neighborhoods with the highest density of children under the age of 14.

Officials implementing Border 2012, a cleanup plan sponsored by the United States and Mexico (Environ. Sci. Technol. 2003, 37, 212A), will now have a hard time making commitments based on Haztraks data to boost chemical release reporting and target pollution prevention efforts, Mowrey adds. —JANET PELLEY