The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [74]
The data compiled in the TRI is available to the public through both government and nongovernmental websites. My personal favorite is Scorecard (www.scorecard.org), which allows you to look up major pollution sources and chemicals by zip code. Scorecard provides information on health impacts, factory profiles, and even lets viewers send a message to their local polluters via the website.
I regularly check Scorecard to see how my own town is doing on the toxics front. It is a sobering experience. Berkeley is a city that prides itself on its high level of environmental awareness. Our public schools serve organic food. There are free parking places downtown for fully electric cars. Yet, my county ranks among the dirtiest 20 percent of all counties in the United States!168 The top polluters in my zip code include manufacturers of machinery and plastics as well as the stinky steel refinery just down the road from my house. The top twenty pollutants reported for my area are glycol ethers, xylene, n-butyl alcohol, toluene, 1,2,4-trimethylbenzene, methanol, ammonia, methyl isobutyl ketone, ethylene glycol, methyl ethyl ketone, styrene, barium compounds, m-xylene, N, N-dimethylformamide, lead, zinc compounds, ethylbenzene, cumene, n-hexane, and formaldehyde.169 Yuck.
The TRI is a great source of information on local pollution sources and on trends in different industrial sectors, but it still needs to be stronger. Scorecard describes TRI’s five biggest limitations: (1) it relies on self-reporting by the polluters, rather than actual monitoring; (2) it doesn’t cover all toxic chemicals; (3) it omits some major pollution sources; (4) it does not require the companies to report the amount of toxic chemicals used in products; and (5) it does not provide information about the possible exposures people may experience as a result of the releases.170 Once these shortcomings are addressed, the TRI could be an even more powerful tool for the public, one we can use to pressure companies to find alternatives to the toxic chemicals they use.
Watching Out for Us (Or Not)
Maybe the TRI has you contemplating the role of the government in all this. Haven’t we elected or appointed someone to be in charge of making sure that we’re safe from dangerous chemicals? What about the Food and Drug Administration? The Environmental Protection Agency? The Occupational Safety and Health Administration? Well, the very sad and very scary fact is, our government’s regulation of toxic materials is riddled with holes.
For starters, the government’s regulation takes a fragmented approach. We regulate chemicals in consumer products, air, water, land, our food, and our factories separately. A fundamental problem with this division of roles is that it approaches the environment as if it were a collection of discrete units, rather than one complex interrelated system. Often the agency staff who regulate the same chemical compound in water, air, our products. and the workplace don’t even talk to one another, and when they do, they sometimes vehemently disagree.
Take fish, for example: the EPA has authority to monitor pollution in fish you catch from a stream, while the FDA has authority over a fish that someone else catches and you buy at the grocery store. The two agencies are supposed to work together and sometimes they do, like in 2004, when they jointly released guidelines recommending that pregnant women, women of childbearing age, nursing mothers, and young children not eat more than 12 ounces of fish each week in order to limit mercury intake.171 Then, in late 2008, the FDA drafted a new report recommending that women now eat more than 12 ounces of fish each week.172 The Washington Post reported that the FDA did