July 26, 2004—The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently issued its 15th annual Toxics Release Inventory (TRI), the annual report on the amount of toxic chemicals released into the environment by reporting facilities for calendar year 2002. Almost 25,000 facilities reported on nearly 650 chemicals.
While the TRI Public Data Release will show that there was a 15 percent decrease in total disposal or other releases into the environment from 2001 to 2002, that decrease is largely attributable to a court decision that affected reporting by the metal mining sector. Without metal mining, there was a 5 percent increase from 2001 to 2002, primarily due to increases reported by one facility. Looking at the overall history of TRI, trends analysis shows chemical releases decreased 49 percent since the inception of TRI in 1988.
The TRI data and background information are available to the public at EPA/TRI.
Communities can also quickly and easily identify local facilities and chemical releases by using the TRI explorer mapping tool, also available from EPA.
