Toxic Chemicals

EPA's Toxic Release Inventory Is Useful but Can Be Improved Gao ID: RCED-91-121 June 27, 1991

Pursuant to a legislative requirement, GAO reviewed the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) and the states' implementation of the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) Program, focusing on: (1) the availability and accessibility of the inventory to the public; (2) how the public, states, EPA, and other federal agencies used the inventory data; and (3) legislative and administrative options to improve the usefulness of the inventory.

GAO found that: (1) about 6.24 billion pounds of toxic chemicals were reportedly emitted into the air, land, and water or transferred to waste treatment, storage, or disposal locations in 1988; (2) since environmental managers lacked complete, long-term data on toxic pollutants in the air, land, and water, the success of federal environmental programs has been difficult to measure; (3) public availability of the inventory data prompted some companies to make public commitments to meeting corporate pollution reduction goals; (4) environmental and public interest groups extensively use the inventory and the federal and state agencies use the inventory to manage environmental programs; (5) TRI did not include information on emissions from sources other than the manufacturing sector or from manufacturing facilities with fewer than 10 employees, and did not include information on many widely used toxic chemicals; (6) EPA has initiated several public outreach projects to inform the public about toxic pollution; (7) although users of the public database expressed general satisfaction with the system's usefulness, features, and cost, users were not assured of the inventory data's quality, since EPA used its limited inspection resources to identify facilities that failed to report data rather than to examine the quality of data already submitted; (8) at least 10,000 facilities have not submitted emissions reports and many small- to medium-sized facilities remain unaware of their obligation to report; and (9) although various EPA inspection strategies to identify nonreporters were not uniformly effective, EPA was taking enforcement action against nonreporters that submitted the required report after an inspection.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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