SURVEILLANCE AND MONITORING: Toxics Report Improves, but Data Still Limited

One of the gaping holes in the public health tool kit is the lack of comprehensive knowledge about the occurrence and toxic effects of the full spectrum of chemicals emitted by industrial facilities. The Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) has taken a small step toward filling this void by assembling selected basic toxics data for North America with the 10 June 2009 release of its 12th annual report, Taking Stock: 2005 North American Pollutant Releases and Transfers. The CEC oversees the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation, which supports the environmental provisions of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Taking Stock pulls together the latest data available for all 3 countries on industrial emissions that are tracked under categories such as toxic releases and transfers, criteria air pollutants, fugitive emissions, and greenhouse gases. The report applies a single risk-scoring metric, the toxic equivalency potential (TEP), to make an apples-to-apples comparison of the relative potential threat posed by some of the toxics tracked. And it focuses in particular on North American petroleum industry pollutants, providing what the CEC says is the most complete reporting yet on this industrial sector. The report draws much of its data from each country’s pollutant release and transfer register (PRTR): the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) of the United States, the National Pollutant Release Inventory (NPRI) of Canada, and the Registro de Emisiones y Transferencia de Contaminantes (RETC) of Mexico. PRTRs examine the media into which pollutants are released—air, water, land, and underground injection—along with transfers of pollutants offsite for recycling, energy recovery, treatment, or other management. Criteria air pollutants are tracked separately, and greenhouse gases are identified through a third data set. From a very basic perspective, the Taking Stock report series is favorably received. “It does help to see all the data together, using all the same units of measurement,” says Richard Valentinetti, director of the Air Pollution Control Division within the Vermont Depart ment of Environmental Conservation. He also notes that it’s important to monitor and address pollution problems across borders. But he believes the CEC reports provide limited overall value. “There always are problems comparing data between the three countries,” he says. That’s because the countries’ tracking systems for various pollutants have widely divergent reporting requirements that won’t be synchronized anytime soon. It’s also due to underlying weaknesses of each individual database. “In the United States, we’re still not doing a good job with normal emission inventories,” he says. Even with such limitations—which the CEC acknowledges—the report is useful for identifying and examining largescale, continent-wide problems, says François Lavallée, manager of Environment Canada’s Comprehensive Inventory Compilation and Quality Assurance/Quality Control Section. He anticipates that future reports will become increasingly beneficial since this is just the second year that data for Mexico have been included. The available data show that the continent’s air, water, surface, and subsurface received at least 8,484 billion kg of greenhouse gases, 32 billion kg of criteria air pollutants, and 5.5 billion kg of potentially toxic releases and transfers in 2005. The United States was the primary source, in part because Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.