The Americas Program of the Silver City, New Mexico-based non-profit International Relations Center is taking this opportunity to comment on the Environmental Protection Agency's proposed rules for reduction of the burden for reporting industrial chemical discharges for inclusion in the Toxics Release Inventory.
We oppose the federal initiative, which would undercut the power of the TRI, one of the world’s most useful tools for guaranteeing corporate disclosure, accountability, and transparency regarding hazardous wastes. The proposal would loosen industry’s reporting requirements and permit polluters to emit 10 times more than now without informing the public.
The United States, as a signatory to the North American Free Trade Agreement and the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation, is bound to improve its environmental standards and harmonize them with the other signatory parties, Canada and Mexico. Relieving production facilities of their obligations to report at current threshold levels would fly in the face of the North American treaty responsibility, violating international law, and setting a bad precedent for reciprocal treatment between partner countries.
U.S. decision makers, first responders, and community members have earned the right to access the environmental information database provided by TRI and deserve to have it protected. It is a database that many other countries’ citizens would like to replicate at home. Mexican citizens’ decade-long effort to achieve a similar mandatory, public register will be undermined if the proposed so-called burden reduction measures are approved.
Mexico is on the verge of writing standards for its long-awaited Pollutant Release and Transfer Register in which the issue of thresholds for reporting is key, since never before has the country had an industrial toxic waste inventory. For the United States to relax its threshold tension would set a bad example, leading to under-reporting in Mexico. This will not only negatively impact Mexican communities, but also those on the rest of the continent, since we share ecosystems and the planet.
EPA’s proposed exemption for reporting low-level disposals of persistent bioaccumulative toxins (PBTs) would have the same effect, and we oppose the exemption for the same reason. The guise of burden reduction does not justify a rollback in citizens’ right to know.
At the IRC, we have a Global Good Neighbor Initiative that encourages our civil servants, such as those in the EPA, to respond to the everyday citizens’ concerns for domestic policy and for its impacts on our geopolitical neighbors in the era of globalization. In the Americas Program, our Project for Community Right to Know and Communications Rights joins many partners in the United States, the hemisphere, and the world who are demanding that the Environmental Protection Agency defend our right to know and “protect” us from being left with only the right to guess.
Talli Nauman is the IRC Americas Program Associate and editor at large (online at americas.irc-online.org.)
