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Boston—Exposure
to dangerous toxic pollution from industrial facilities threatens
communities in Massachusetts and across the country, according to a new
report released today by MASSPIRG. Despite those threats, the EPA
recently moved to restrict public access to this information, by
rolling back parts of the federal Toxic Release Inventory (TRI), a 20
year old program that makes information about toxics released in local
communities public.
The report, Toxic Pollution and Health,
uses information from the TRI to analyze toxic pollution linked to
serious health problems such as cancer, birth defects or neurological
damage. As a result of the EPA’s recent action restricting the public’s
right-to-know; today’s report may provide one of the last complete
pictures of toxic pollution in Massachusetts.
In
2004, facilities in Massachusetts ranked 27 th in the country for the
most releases of carcinogens to the air and water, for example. One zip
code in Boston, 02111, ranked 12 th in this same category.
“This
report confirms that communities across Massachusetts are routinely put
at risk by toxic pollution linked to serious health impacts,” said
Janet S. Domenitz, MASSPIRG Executive Director. “If anything, we need
more information on these kinds of releases in our communities, not
less, as the Bush administration has engineered it.”
The
federal Toxic Release Inventory is a public right-to-know program that
requires industrial facilities to publicly disclose their toxic
releases. In 2004, EPA reported that the TRI has helped to reduce toxic
pollution by 57% nationwide since its inception in 1988. Despite this
success, the EPA recently weakened the program by authorizing
industrial facilities to withhold previously reported pollution
information. Specifically, on Dec. 22, 2006, the EPA finalized a new
rule that lets facilities stop submitting detailed reports for
management of persistent bioaccumulative toxins (PBTs), other than
dioxins, under 500 pounds. For all other chemicals, the EPA raised the
threshold at which companies are required to submit detailed reports
from 500 to 5000 pounds per year of waste generation, if less than 2000
pounds are released to the environment.
“To
address the potential health threats from toxic pollution, we need full
information about what toxics are being released, where, and in what
amounts,” said Alyssa Schuren, Executive Director of the Toxics Action
Center, a New England-wide group that works with local citizens
fighting neighborhood pollution. “Unfortunately, EPA’s attack on the
public’s right-to-know means that Massachusetts communities will be
left in the dark about toxic pollution.”
In
the spring of 2006, the House of Representatives, including all ten
Massachusetts Congressmen, voted to stop the EPA from adopting this
rollback. The measure never made it the Senate, and died at the end of
the session. Now, Reps. Frank Palloneand Hilda Solis (D-CA), and Senators Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA),
have challenged EPA’s rollbacks by introducing the Toxic Right-to-Know
Protection Act (H.R. 1055 and S. 595). This legislation would reverse
the rollbacks to restore the lost data and ensure that communities have
full and complete access to toxic pollution information. (D-NJ)
“We
hope the Massachusetts delegation will champion this bill and get
Congress to act quickly to repair the damage EPA’s done to the public’s
right to know,” concluded Domenitz.
