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Community Right to Know legislation provides a means to give citizens and the general public the tools to protect themselves and their environment. The most common form of community right to know in the environmental field is through the establishment of pollutant releases and transfer registers. These instruments are called Toxic Release Inventories or Pollutant Inventories.

Pollutant or toxic release inventories must answer a number of questions.

1) Who is generating potentially harmful releases or wastes to air, land, and water. ?
2) What pollutants are being released to the environment ?
3) How much is being released or transferred over time ie. annually ?
4) Are the pollutants being dumped into the air, water or land?
5) What is the geographic distribution of pollutant releases? Are they in my neighborhood, near schools, or environmentally sensitive sites?

These types of schemes also allow community groups to track the pollution performance of companies over a period of time. Community groups around the world have found Pollutant Inventories to be a powerful tool to lobby for change within governments and directly with industry. Community Right to Know legislation, combined with schemes such as Pollutant Inventories, has a number of benefits:

STOP SECRET POLLUTION: Without the Right to Know, companies can dump thousands of tonnes of chemicals into the environment every year without the public ever knowing. Pollution inventories can provide real gains towards reducing pollution and protecting the environment. They also empower people living adjacent to industrial facilities, and the workers in those plants, by giving them the right to know about dangerous chemicals used, transported and emitted by those facilities. This knowledge empowers people to protect their families, their homes, and themselves from harmful substances.

MASSIVE REDUCTIONS IN POLLUTION: Since the United States introduced a Toxics Release Inventory in 1987, releases of toxic chemicals to the environment have decreased by 20 percent on average, and in some states, such as California, companies have completely stopped emitting six listed chemicals.

POLLUTION PREVENTION: Public disclosure captures the attention of high level industrial decision makers and strengthens the role of environmental managers in companies. For example, on the eve of the first national release of the United States Toxic Release Inventory data, Monsanto Corp went public with a 'pre-emptive' pledge to reduce the company's world wide toxic emissions by 90%. Sometimes industry and government utilities are more responsive to public and consumer pressure than to regulatory requirements.

COMMUNITY HEALTH PROMOTION: Pollution reporting provides a context for health promotion and is a pre-requisite to undertake proper environmental planning. Any toxic release inventory system has the potential to help identify environmental hazards in local and regional areas.

WORKER HEALTH & SAFETY: Many workers are exposed to pollution in the workplace. Development of chemical/pollutant inventories not only helps the community but also informs workers about the threats posed by hazardous substances in the workplace.

INFORM POLICY DEVELOPMENT: Legislators and policy makers gain valuable information from a Toxic Release Inventory with which to evaluate and make policy decisions and ultimately spend resources.

TOXICS REDUCTION: Pollutant inventories provides the basis for broader toxic reduction programmes. To reduce pollution you firstly have to know the amounts and type of pollution released into the environment. William K. Reilly, Administrator of the US EPA comments; "Gathering and analysing information about the use of toxic chemicals is the first - and perhaps most crucial - step towards reducing the threat posed by the use of toxic chemicals".

COST EFFECTIVE: The wealth of international experience obtained in running these programmes combined with new information technologies are making it increasingly viable to cheaply report an increasing number of chemicals. International experience tells us that only a small number of industries would use more than a few chemicals listed on an inventory. For example, in the United States which until 1995 collected information for around 300 substances, the average company reported using only four chemicals.

A World Wide Fund for Nature and Hampshire Research Institute report indicated that generic software for the standardised reporting of pollutant emissions and database management could reduce the cost of establishing public Pollutant and Release Transfer registers by half, for smaller countries. Operating such an inventory in most countries is estimated to require personal computers and a couple of people, although additional resources are needed for training smaller businesses in how to submit the data for dissemination of the data.

GLOBAL ACCOUNTABILITY
Without mandatory audits and cleaner production planning, and in the absence of public accountability, companies often have little incentive to change current practices - even if these changes are financially beneficial. Industry and government must be made accountable at both a community and a global level.

Global Right to Know - OECD Public Release Transfer Registers
Chapter one of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Public Release Transfer Registers (PRTR) Guidance to Government document states:" PRTR is one segment of a whole materials balance in which governments may wish to rack total national inputs and outputs of given substances, eg., whole life cycle including production and the use of products".

Global Right to Know - Agenda 21
The role of the Right to Know and importance of toxic chemical inventories is a recurring theme in Agenda 21's Chapter 19 on management of toxic chemicals as these following excerpts demonstrate.

Environmental Democracy in Action:
- Individual countries will be urged to create toxic chemical inventories in a Right to Know framework, with the aim of coordinating their information systems with those of other countries in order to achieve international compatibility.
- Individual corporations are urged to adopt Right to Know in principle, even in the absence of country-specific survey efforts and to make it company policy to provide chemical-specific data upon request." Agenda 21, UNCED, 1992

RIGHT TO KNOW: UNITED STATES

In the wake of the toxic gas accident in Bhopal, India, the Emergency Planning and Community Right to Know Act (1986) was enacted in the US. This law requires companies to develop emergency response plans through a committee of community representatives. These committees have virtually unlimited access to information about the toxic chemicals manufactured, used, stored, or discharged by facilities in their area. The Act's other main function is to make the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) publicly available. Companies must fill in annual forms giving the quantities of 654 chemicals they emit to land, water, sewers and air. They must also account for chemicals transferred to incineration, deep well injection and to on-site and off-site recycling. This information is actively disseminated to the public via paper reports, computer disks and on-line or telephone support services. Since the passage of the Act, its success has been hailed by industry, government and public groups alike. Most groups have used the data made available under the TRI to push for reductions in their individual States. The TRI effectively forced many industries to quantify how much waste they were generating, spurring research into cleaner practices. It also helped government push the pollution prevention agenda by making companies publicly accountable.

U.S. Environment Protection Authority results of the 1993 Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) found industrial releases of toxic chemicals were reported to have declined by 12.6 percent during 1993, double the rate of decline during 1992. This equals a decline of 406 million pounds. Reported toxic releases have declined by nearly 43 percent since 1988.
According to the 1993 US TRI data:
· Transfers of toxic chemicals for waste management have increased by about four percent since 1992. The increase was primarily driven by transfers for recycling, which increased by around 11 percent. Transfers for disposal increased by 23 percent.
· Transfers to publicly-owned sewage treatment plants and other treatment facilities also decreased.
· Emissions to air reportedly decreased by 11 percent since 1992, and 39 percent since 1988. Releases to waterways decreased two percent from 1992 levels. Total surface water discharges declined 13 percent since 1988.
· Reported releases of toxic chemicals to land decreased 15 percent since 1992, and nearly 44 percent since 1988. Toxic chemicals injected underground decreased 21 percent since 1992 and 57 percent since 1988.

RIGHT TO KNOW: Canada. The Canadian National Pollutant Release Inventory requires reporting of 176 substances to a community accessible data base which is available 'on-paper' and via the Internet. The first reporting year was 1993.

RIGHT TO KNOW: Australia. Federal and State governments have agreed to establish a National Pollutant Inventory (NPI), which in the first year will requires reporting of releases of 36 substances to air and water. The NPI will be expanded in subsequent years to include 96 substances. Information will be available via the Internet and CD-Rom. The first data will be available in the year 2000.

RIGHT TO KNOW: The Netherlands. The Netherlands national inventory of pollutant emissions was initiated in 1974, and covers emissions to air and water for facilities in major industries. The 1990 Individual Emission Inventory included approximately 900 emitted substances and about 7000 companies, with each emission linked to a particular point in the production process. Information is publicly available.

RIGHT TO KNOW: The United Kingdom. The Chemical Release Inventory (CRI) consists of data collected, under the Environment Protection Act 199?, from approximately 5,000 facilities. The CRI covers 260 substances, but there is no central data-base. The information is available to the public via registers in seven separate regional centres.

RIGHT TO KNOW: Japan. A pollutant release and transfer (PRTR) law was proclaimed in July 1999. Currently the selection of the substances covered by the law and other preparative work toward implementation is going on in the government.

DO-IT-YOURSELF POLLUTANT INVENTORIES - Sick of lobbying? Tired of getting nowhere with slow moving governments and self interested industries? Why not set up your own pollution inventory? Local groups on the Mexican-United State border have been developing community inventories, and in 1995, the National Toxics Network and Greenpeace Australia built community inventories of major chemical companies, using surveys based on the United States Toxics Release Inventory.

OTHER RIGHT TO KNOW INSTRUMENTS

Material Safety Data Sheets: Material Safety Data Sheets are provided to workers in many OECD countries. These give information on all the chemicals that workers are exposed to in their workplace. This is not common practice in non-OECD countries, even though the same corporations that operate there have to provide this information in their OECD countries of operation.
Product labeling: Full product labelling educates consumers and influences their behaviour, which in turn exerts pressure on industry to respond to the demands of their ecologically-aware customers. The Wuppertal Institute in Germany has developed an indicator of material use, known as Material Intensity per Service Unit (MIPS). The use of MIPS in product labelling would allow consumers to compare the eco-efficiencies of different models, for example, MIPS on washing machines would give customers information on the quantity of materials used to produce the washing machine, per washing cycle. MIPS values might reveal that a more robust (though more material intensive) model is more eco-efficient due to its durability and sparse use of water per washing cycle.

Public participation in the planning process: Public access to information must not remain passive and only emission/product focused. Public participation in decision making must extend to planning processes - to ensure the proper use of Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) and audits. A thorough EIA should not only highlight potential environmental problems, but also generate alternatives to the proposed project. To do this, the need and purpose of the proposed project must be evaluated using Clean Production criteria.
International cleaner production database: Many non-OECD countries have been calling for an up-to-date databank of cleaner technologies. This service should not only provide information on cleaner production but also track foreign investment and provide free advice to non-OECD governments.

Freedom of Information: Many developed countries including the United States and Australia have Freedom of Information legislation. This legislation allows citizens to request and receive government documents. It allows for more transparent decision making and allows communities to access environmental data held by government agencies.

Corporate Environmental Reporting: Including environmental information such as emissions in annual environment reports has become fashionable amongst some trans-national corporations. Companies such as ICI, BP and Dow have started commissioning annual environmental reports on their activities. These reports often aggregate emissions so it is difficult to pin-point specific plants and usually only look at a few substances as indicators. Some companies have come under fire for corporate reports because greater emphasis was placed on public relations than factual reporting.
ENDS