Gotta love Ohio!

Gotta love Ohio! Nothing like being one of the most industrialized states in the nation and now, the most polluting as well.

The Blade
http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051114/NEWS06/511140305
Article published November 14, 2005Annual polluter reports may end; U.S. EPA considering cutback to reduce costs to industry
(c) 2005

Zoom By TOM HENRY, BLADE STAFF WRITER
Ohio released more chemicals into the air from industry smokestacks and similar devices than any other state between 1998 and 2003. And, in 2003 - the most recent year federal reporting data is available - the Buckeye State came in fourth for overall releases to the environment. That takes into account everything that an industrial source released to the air, water or land.

Those statistics are the kind of things that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has made available on an annual basis for nearly 20 years, under a public right-to-know program called the Toxic Release Inventory. But now, ostensibly to give industry a break by reducing its paperwork, the Bush administration is proposing to roll back the reporting requirement to once every two years. It also wants to raise the bar tenfold by allowing companies that release fewer than 5,000 pounds of chemicals in a given year to report less information. The current threshold is 500 pounds.

The public has until Dec. 5 to comment on the latter. Agency officials told members of Congress on Sept. 21 that they will likely spend another year weighing the pros and cons of moving away from annual reporting before deciding whether to go beyond the internal discussion stage. Records show the federal EPA has previously solicited comments from industry groups. The U.S. EPA leaves little doubt why it's contemplating a switch to alternate-year reporting.

Agency fact sheets call the plan a proposed "burden reduction rule" to help save industry money. Administration officials say small businesses could be the biggest benefactors, by avoiding the expense of what some perceive as costly and cumbersome bureaucracy. There are 23,985 facilities nationwide that are required to disclose their chemical releases to the government. The U.S. EPA estimates they collectively spend $650 million a year to do so. "We're not saying we want the program disbanded," said Michael Walls, managing director of the American Chemistry Council, which has urged less frequent reporting since 1999. "We just want to see if it can be done as effectively at less cost. "Few people familiar with the TRI - the abbreviated name that regulators, businessmen and activists use for the annual inventory - claim it is perfect. Case in point: The nation's biggest overall polluter for 2003, on paper, was Alaska, which has one of the nation's most pristine reputations.

Counted differently
But Alaska has its totals grossly weighed down by all the tons of pollutants associated with its mining and disposal operations. Industry for years has questioned why chemicals injected underground or buried in waterproof landfills are tallied the same as those which get emitted into the sky or into a body of water, where they have a more immediate chance of impacting public health.

The reason: The TRI is simple number crunching. It's not intended to be a subjective analysis.
It's an annual report stuffed with raw, self-reported industry numbers for air, water, and land releases - all of which are highly subject to interpretation and, at face value, offer no perspective on risk.

But many people also defend the TRI as a valuable starting point for thousands of journalists, community activists, government officials, academic researchers, business executives and health advocates trying to evaluate both a region's existing pollution issues and its potential for industrial growth.

Without it, there would be virtually no perspective.

That's why proponents are puzzled by the Bush's administration's consideration of alternate-year reporting.
"There's almost no law that has been more successful in reducing pollution at less cost," said Dan Esty, director of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy at Yale University's law school. He and others said the annual inventory has helped awaken industry to the need for more recycling and other forms of efficiency. Some have simply been "shamed" by how their numbers have stacked up against competitors, he said.

Indeed, businesses are putting out less pollution now, pound-for-pound, than they were in the 1980s.
Although the TRI list of 600-some chemicals has changed over the years, releases are down in nearly all categories since the 1980s. Many attribute that to efficiency inspired by the public airing of TRI figures.

Ohio's progress
In Ohio, one of the nation's most industrialized states, undeniable progress has been made in reducing air pollution, despite the state's current No. 1 ranking for smokestack emissions.

Mr. Esty, a former U.S. EPA deputy chief of staff under President Bush's father who also briefly served under former President Clinton as a U.S. EPA policy administrator, said he can think of "no thoughtful policy analyst in the environmental realm who thinks this needs revision."

The American Lung Association, which uses the TRI as a starting point for reports about asthma and other breathing issues that Americans face, concedes that sheer numbers don't tell the whole story.
But as Janice Nolen, the group's national policy director said: "The lung association feels strongly that less information is not a good thing when it comes to your health."

The American Chemistry Council agrees that TRI has been effective at getting industry to operate more efficiently.

But, like a lot of things in business, the law of diminishing returns eventually comes into play, Mr. Walls said.
"Just because we're used to doing something doesn't mean we should accept the inherent high costs or burden of doing it," he said.

Access to data is something that Americans largely take for granted.

But the U.S. government itself was largely oblivious to what industry was releasing until one of the world's largest environmental disasters occurred on the other side of the planet in 1984, when a deadly cloud of methyl isocyanate killed thousands of people who lived near a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India. Residents who lived in that part of India didn't know what was being stored at that plant. U.S. officials realized that many people in this country were equally in the dark about chemicals in their own neighborhoods.
So the requirement for annual disclosure began under public right-to-know laws.

One component of that was the creation of databases to help emergency responders become better educated about what gets moved through their communities. Another was the TRI program for the general public.

Sandy Buchanan, Ohio Citizen Action executive director, said the federal government relied heavily upon Ohio's own right-to-know laws to help formulate a parallel set on the federal level. Ohio was one of the states at the time that had such laws at the state level.

She said her activist group has used TRI data in a number of ways, including its recent campaign for reductions in air emissions at the Sunoco Inc. refinery that straddles East Toledo and Oregon. Ms. Buchanan said she is worried what might happen if the federal EPA scales back TRI reporting to alternate years.

"It will get companies out of the habit," she said. "If you're not measuring emissions, you're not measuring efficiency," she said. "It's a part of doing business."