Federal Toxic Release Inventory Program

Robert Sabie Jr. and Jarrett Wheeler are students at Huxley College of the Environment at Western Washington University.

Editor’s note: This piece accompanies, “Your Right to Know: Federal Toxic Release Inventory Program,” published in the April 2011 edition of Whatcom Watch. Dr. Troy Abel spoke last month at Village Books on “Coming Clean: Information Disclosure and Environmental Performance,” a book he recently co-authored.

Jarrett Wheeler: This book addresses a narrow topic in environmental regulation that may seem inaccessible to most people. Who are you trying to reach with this book and why should they read it?

Dr. Troy Abel: Our primary audience actually is policy makers and perhaps what we might call “issue publics” around information disclosure. So these motivated and more interested groups, environmental groups, community groups, that are trying to address toxics in their community, and the policy makers behind the toxics release inventory, which is really kind of the focus of the book, of course, or at least a program that we evaluate. Those folks have been very interested and have invited us to talk to them in several cases. So we also see an audience really across the states. There are lots of states that are involved in additional information disclosure on top of what the U.S. federal government already requires.

So, again, it’s a specialized policy strategy. So it primarily meets, or is targeted to, audiences who are more interested in that. But I think there is also a public out there who are concerned about toxics in their community. I think, also, because our research has implications for lots of information disclosure programs like greenhouse gas emissions, which we are trying to initially deal with an information disclosure program, I think it could have a wider audience. Finally, we hope it’s a nice model for upper division policy students, and even graduate students who are looking to do policy analysis.

Robert Sabie Jr.: Protecting the public welfare is one of the key attributes of our government. The implications of the Toxic Release Inventory program are easy to see from the public perspective, but how might industry benefit from the Toxic Release Inventory program?

Dr. Troy Abel: I think one of the big benefits that we illuminate in this book is that it allows industry to systematically quantify their environmental management and its outputs releases that are waste inefficiencies and so forth. So I think it helped industry, certainly earlier in the program, think about how much they were wasting, how much they were polluting their communities and how much risk they were putting their neighbors in. You saw a lot of industries take an initiative earlier on to reduce their pollution releases and now I think industry continues to benefit from things like the Toxic Release Inventory program, because it keeps them thinking and working on their environmental management and improving and pursuing pollution prevention, instead of cleaning it up after it’s been released into the environment.

Jarrett Wheeler: Community involvement, or as you term “civic environmentalism,” is a key factor in making use of the Toxic Release Inventory program data. How should the gap between public understandings of the data be closed in order for the Toxic Release Inventory program to become more effective?

Dr. Troy Abel: Right now the Toxic Release Inventory program data is basically the same structure that we started with more than 30 years ago: volume and the chemical type. One of the things that we think is really missing is any good common and accessible assessment of varying levels of risk attributable to different pollution releases. So we apply a risk screening model in the book to distinguish riskier facilities from less riskier facilities, and in our policy recommendations, we really prescribe that the EPA pursue a next generation version of what we’ve been using that the public can access, use and really understand.

Robert Sabie Jr.: One of the main concerns for industry may be potential future liability from their releases. For instance, a chemical may later be found to cause cancer. Even though there are penalties for reporting inaccurate numbers there is little oversight. How does or should the Toxic Release Inventory program encourage industry to report accurate numbers when they are faced with this dilemma?

Dr. Troy Abel: One of the things we found in our state analysis was that there are factors in the background that may be influencing industry’s performance. What we actually began to talk about was this anticipatory performance: industry anticipates that if they don’t improve their environmental performance they may face regulatory scrutiny and pressure from their community, and our statistical analysis in the state chapter, called States of Green, really pulls that out. It shows that in states where there’s an active environmental community and a strong regulatory program, that’s where you see industry achieving a better environmental performance, along with the technical assistance from the government to prevent pollution.

Jarrett Wheeler: You and your fellow authors highlight, there are industry leaders – those companies that use the Toxic Release Inventory program program to better their pollution record, and those who are considered laggards. What are some important examples of each?

Dr. Troy Abel: In the book, we talk about a couple of different case studies where you see leaders and laggards, and I think backing away from individual facilities and thinking about leading states and lagging states in more statistical terms actually help us reveal the factors that influence environmental performance or a lack of environmental performance. So, for instance, we see a lot of leverage in pollution prevention technical assistance, that is government reaching out to industry and say that “we’re here to collaborate, we’re here to help prevent pollution, not necessarily to enforce or force you into compliance, but to help you improve your environmental performance.” That’s where we see more leading industry in states where they’re doing things like that. In states that aren’t doing that, you see those laggards. So distinguishing those two things was helpful in the state-level analysis.

Robert Sabie Jr.: We are witnessing massive populist movements in North Africa, the Middle East, and stateside, the Midwest – particularly Wisconsin. These are political movements and if you really examine the topical issues you have labor pushing back against governments. I would assert that information disclosure plays a large role in mobilizing people along with finding communal justice relative to particular communities. Do you think environmental risk and public health issues are going to play an active role again like they did 30 or 40 years ago?

Dr. Troy Abel: I think environmental risk and public health will come back as an issue, as it was 30 or 40 years ago, if the economy continues to move in the positive direction and we recover. I think there’s a lot of interesting work that’s beginning to happen on public health and industrial environmental risk in air pollution, and I think that is going to begin to disseminate to environmental groups and it will disseminate to communities, and I think these concerns will grow. They’re probably going to, potentially, link up with this kind of greening of individual households; they’re trying to reduce their carbon footprint; they’re trying to reduce the toxic chemicals they use in household cleaners, and I think those things could potentially link together and really facilitate a lot of individual level behavior that would then influence industrial and community level behavior. So I see the opportunity for that to happen, but one of the barriers to that continues to be our economic troubles.