EPA proposes to relax reporting rules for corporate toxic releases
States and companies claim the move could harm pollution-prevention efforts.
Companies would report their releases of toxic chemicals every other year instead of annually, and more chemicals would be eligible for less-detailed disclosures under two new proposals announced by the U.S. EPA on October 4. The agency claims that the initiatives will reduce the burden on companies and help EPA staff improve data quality. However, officials at some companies, including Dow Chemical Co., say the changes will only modestly affect their bottom lines, whereas state officials complain that the changes are likely to torpedo their pollution-prevention programs.
EPA notified Congress that it would initiate a rulemaking in 1–2 years to change Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) reporting to alternate years (Fed. Regist. 2005, 70, 57,871–57,872). In place since 1987, the TRI is credited with motivating companies to make dramatic cuts in chemical releases. Since its inception, reporting companies have cut their releases by 49%, or 1.59 billion pounds (lb).
EPA officials say the proposal will affect 24,000 facilities and 650 chemicals. With the changes, $2 million will be reallocated for every nonreporting year to improve TRI software at the agency and to make the data more useful.
In addition, EPA published a proposed rule that will allow TRI reporters to switch from the 5-page Form R to the 2-page Form A if they release less than 5000 lb of a specific chemical per year [ddd] (Fed. Regist. 2005, 70, 57,822–57,847). The current threshold is 500 lb. Form R details how much waste was treated; recycled; transferred offsite; and released to air, water, and land. Form A merely certifies that the waste was generated.
The proposed rule would also, for the first time, allow persistent bioaccumulative toxics, such as mercury, to be reported on the shorter Form A, as long as no releases have occurred and less than 500 lb are managed for treatment or recycling.
EPA’s claim that short-form reporting will affect less than 1% of releases by weight nationwide misses the impact on local communities, says Tom Natan, research director of the National Environmental Trust, a lobbying and educational organization. He analyzed the approximately 9000 zip codes in the U.S. that have at least one facility reporting on the long form and found that more than 10% will lose all long-form reporting.
Alternate-year reporting will miss spikes and valleys in releases from individual facilities, Natan adds. He averaged data from 2001 and 2003 and found that the result was a poor predictor of releases in 2002. “Of the 93,000 forms submitted in 2002, 69,000 had releases [more than] 20% higher or lower than predicted, and 56,000 had releases more than 50% higher or lower than predicted,” he says. Alternate-year reporting creates an incentive to increase releases during nonreporting years, Natan adds.
“Our analysis shows that over half of the facilities that report on TRI have changes in their releases [of] less than 10% from year to year,” responds Kimberley Nelson, EPA’s assistant administrator for environmental information. Other regulatory programs, such as hazardous waste, have required biennial reporting for years with no allegations of improper manipulation of data, she adds.
Dow would experience only a moderate reduction in regulatory burden by the moves, since its reporting systems are embedded in internal programs such as quality assurance, says Jeannine Sohayda, a Dow spokesperson.
The 23 states with pollution-prevention planning laws aimed at helping companies reduce their toxic releases wouldn’t be able to track progress in nonreporting years. Those that base their fees on TRI could lose funding and be forced to reduce technical assistance to companies, says Ken Zarker, chair of the National Pollution Prevention Roundtable, an educational organization. The changes would also reduce data quality, Zarker says, because of the new discontinuity in reporting at companies.
