As you probably know, the Obama administration released the Open Government Directive this morning.  OMB Watch applauds this latest effort to create a more open and accountable government.

In this season of gift giving, the results appear to be well worth the wait.  The president called for progress on three main principles – transparency, participation, and collaboration and the directive delivers on all three with specific requirements and deadlines for all agencies.  The directive was comprised of four main components centered on very simple but important themes – publishing information; creating a culture of openness; improving data quality; and updating policies to allow for greater openness.  

We are especially pleased to how many of the issues and concerns raised by the right-to-know community in the report called Moving Toward a 21st Century Right to Know Agenda. Among the 70 detailed recommendations in the report were requests for creating incentives for openness, interagency coordination, and publication of high-priority data that is currently unavailable – all of which are addressed in the new directive.

However, the proof is in the pudding.  Implementation over the next few months will reveal how much new transparency we will actually receive from this process.  This first step, the instructions to the agencies, has gone well, now our work must focus on ensuring the next step, implementation by agencies, goes equally well and produces substantive change.

On April 9 I introduced the need for improving the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) and suggested three broad paths for achieving this. Here I discuss one path – expanding information. We always want more information. And for a while TRI was a program regularly searching for new data to report with new industries being added, new chemicals, lowering the threshold for some chemicals, and adding federal facilities. But recently we have gone backwards with an effort by the agency to raise the reporting thresholds and have fewer detailed reports filed.

There are three main ways I see that TRI can expand the data being reported 1) New toxic chemicals 2) New industries 3) Expand to important non-toxic chemicals.

Toxic Pollutants

According to the Government Accountability Office approximately 700 new chemicals are introduced each year. However, the TRI program has not added any new chemicals to the list of those requiring reporting since the expansion for reporting year 2000. That means approximately 5,600 (8 years * 700 chemicals) have been introduced without one reported on in TRI.

Obviously not every chemical is dangerous enough to merit being tracked in the TRI program. But with numerous new chemicals being introduced and new facts about the toxicity and risks from existing chemicals being discovered all the time, an eight-year freeze on expanding the chemicals being tracked seems pretty un-defendable.

California's Proposition 65 adds chemicals to its list of chemicals known to the state to cause cancer, birth defects, or other reproductive harm every year. The program also updates toxicity information for numerous listed chemicals each year. For example, last year California changed its classification for hexavalent chromium compounds. Hexavalent chromium was already listed as a carcinogen, but in December 2008 it was also listed as a developmental and a reproductive toxin.

I would recommend that EPA establish a process for the agency to regularly review and identify chemicals that need to be added. Currently, the program allows the public and state governors to petition for the addition or removal of specific chemicals. But that process is too passive. Many in the public trust the EPA to be the expert voice on the issue of toxicity or risk from chemicals. In EPA’s review process, special emphasis should be placed on chemicals already identified by states, other federal agencies or other countries as toxic. The agency should consider adding chemicals in batches every four or five years. This time frame would prevent the TRI list from becoming out of date but also allow for trends within the data to be examined before reporting requirements change.

Expanding covered industries

Once again it is important to note that EPA has not reviewed industries to possible addition to the program since the mid-1990s. And while many of the larger industries that generate toxic pollution are already a part of the program, there are noticeable oversights.

For instance, oil and gas extraction facilities are not covered under TRI but produce tons of hazardous waste that has been documented to have polluted drinking water sources (see hydraulic fracturing. Some groups have suggested airports which are near population centers and have issues with toxic jet fuel, de-icing chemicals and other toxic products used in large quantities. Concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) are another possible industry. The CAFOs are huge emitters of ammonia among other toxins, and including them would provide needed transparency regarding these expanding facilities.

Once again we recommend that EPA establish a process to regularly review industries that might be included in the TRI program to identify the highest priority ones. The timeframe should be the same as the process to review chemicals for possible inclusion to minimize the disturbance changes in the program create for trend analysis. It should also be noted that if EPA were to expand the chemicals being tracked, then some industries might become more important to have in the TRI program.

Breaking Free of Toxics Limitation

Probably the boldest expansion that people have spoken of would be to add chemicals that aren’t specifically toxic to humans to the TRI program. The idea would be to truly transform the TRI into a pollutant reporting system. The program already has the authority to list chemicals that are environmentally toxic, but the agency and others have often been reluctant to pursue this vein of chemicals in TRI. Toxicity has been a good starting point for our focus on pollution in TRI but it is time to grow beyond that and begin addressing the many other reasons to track and reduce pollutants.

The timeliest group of non-toxic pollutants to consider is Greenhouse Gas emissions. The EPA is establishing requirements for a greenhouse gas registry and some regulatory effort to control these emissions in the near future is highly likely. There has been discussion over what role there is for TRI in a greenhouse gas reporting system. From my viewpoint there are both pros and cons to including greenhouse gas emissions in TRI

The TRI program has several advantages that make it an attractive option for playing a role in reporting greenhouse gases. It is a well established, annual EPA reporting project for facility specific releases that has well developed electronic reporting mechanism. However, there are also limitations that would need to be addressed. For instance, the TRI program is currently missing several important industry sectors for greenhouse gases and has no easy way to cover the significant transportation component. Also, the TRI program tracks estimates of releases and transfers but if a cap-and-trade system is pursued for greenhouse gases, the numbers might need to be more accurately measured.

So the decision for possibly adding greenhouse gases to TRI is still not clear, but I strongly recommend that the agency begin incorporating more chemicals that while not immediately toxic to humans contribute to ongoing environmental problems.

If a greenhouse gas registry, or a database of other chemicals, is tracked separate from the TRI program, then there should be an easier way to connect that information with the data from the TRI program. This is the next path for improvement, connecting TRI to other data to give the public a better look at the big picture.

Next blog post: Making connections to other data.