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Introduction
There is a growing concern regarding the impact of exposure to toxic chemicals.
While the immediate effects of breathing cyanide fumes or drinking concentrated
arsenic are quickly apparent, the long-term exposure to trace quantities of a carcinogen is just as deadly and, to the typical individual, just as feared.
Some have attempted to reduce their individual exposure to toxic chemicals by
buying “green products” or consuming “organic food.” It is our opinion that this by
itself is neither effective nor efficient. It requires that each individual have access to
the specific chemical composition of each product with which one comes in contact
as well as information on the toxicity of these specific chemicals. Existing programs
that have resulted in requirements for reporting product composition are presented
in Chapter 2.
One important path by which we are exposed to toxic chemicals is through the
products that we purchase and consume. If there is an appropriate understanding of
the effects of that exposure, then the risk is one that an individual can choose to take,
assuming the benefit of product use is greater than the risk. When a toxic chemical
is released to the air, water, or land in a community, individuals are involuntarily
exposed to risks. While these releases may have the economic benefits of reduced
product cost or local employment, they can pass on to the general public the additional medical costs and suffering associated with the resulting exposure. It took the
tragic release of a toxic gas from a pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, with the deaths of
thousands, to result in legislation to require that companies (and eventually government agencies) report on the release of toxic chemicals to the surroundings. This
legislation (the Community Right-to-Know Act of 1986) resulted in requirements
that companies report to their communities on the storage of toxic chemicals as
well as all release, not just the major ones, such as the one that occurred in Bhopal.
Chemical releases are compiled in a Toxics Release Inventory (TRI), which provides
the public with access to data on annual releases of individual chemicals for each
facility included in the program. Before this legislation took effect, we, and in many
cases the companies themselves, did not know the quantities of toxic chemicals that
they used or released to the environment because, at the time, composition information was not available for the products that the companies used to produce other
products. Chapter 3 lays out the history of toxic chemical release reporting, presenting national data on U.S. toxic chemical release for 2007, the most recent year that
data were available at the time this book was written.
Since the first TRI program was established in the United States, similar pollutant release and transfer register (PRTR) programs have been established in 29 other
countries. Chapter 4 presents information on these PRTR programs.
The requirement that companies and governmental agencies report toxic chemical
release has had the unintended beneficial effect of reducing the use of the individual
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