P O L L U T I O N
Over the last several years, the main thrust of environmental policies has shifted from an emphasis on controlling pollution to one preventing it in the first place. Nowhere is this tendency more clear than in addressing releases of toxic pollutants, generated from many different sources including manufacturing and non-manufacturing industrial processes, use and disposal of consumer products, use of agricultural products, and mobile sources such as automobiles.
Recently, a series of laws were implemented in various countries establishing a national goal for environmental protection to reduce or eliminate waste at its source rather than trying to control it after it is produced. However, effective environmental policy requires sufficient knowledge about pollutants. A lack of easily accessible information has made it difficult to find out how much and what kind of pollution enters the environment. To fully understand the impact of pollutants released and transferred, information is needed concerning the identities of pollutants, the amounts released and transferred, the potential risks involved, and the specific sources of these substances.
One answer to this problem is a unified national reporting system, generally known as a Pollutant Release and Transfer Register (PRTR).
With PRTR data at hand, the user can:
The primary difference between a PRTR and existing permitting-related reporting systems is that PRTR is an integrated (not media-specific) system which is available to all interested parties, including the general public. Citizen groups, regulators and industry can use data for a variety of purposes. In developing the PRTR, the main goal is that the community, industry, and governments gain greater access to relevant information on environmental pollution.
The UK's Chemical Release Inventory was initiated in 1990 - an electronic database with information about the emissions of various polluting substances (since the year 1992) from industrial processes which are regulated under the Integrated Pollution Control scheme. The scheme covers major industrial plants in England and Wales. Annual emissions of over 370 substances are recorded.
In Canada, the National Pollutant Release Inventory began in 1993. Currently, over 1700 facilities report. Finally, the Dutch Emission Inventory System has been in place in various forms since 1974. Currently, emissions of 900 pollutants from 730 major companies are recorded, while emissions from smaller companies and non-point sources are estimated.
The main objectives of the inventory are to: 1) provide information to industry and government that will assist in environmental planning and management, 2) satisfy community needs by providing accessible information on specified emissions in their environment, and 3) promote waste minimization and cleaner production for industry and government.
A commonly expressed concern is that introducing PRTR is expensive. While setting up of the system can be time consuming, in practice, once the system is in place, it does not require much resources. For example, Canada operates the NPRI with some five full-time staff while the US TRI (23,000 reporting facilities) has a staff of about 60. The cost of introducing the system can be reduced based on using available technical assistance and the experience of other countries.
PRTR also offers industry a means of setting environmental priorities and for documenting progress. It can be a highly effective means of identifying opportunities for pollution prevention and offers substantial cost savings to the companies involved. Additionally, PRTR can be used to demonstrate continued improvements required by ISO 14000 and EMAS standards.
By looking at the efficiency of materials usage by indexing wastes and releases to throughput, the PRTR can be used as a benchmarking system, providing information about a company's performance in comparison with competitors.
A commonly raised concern regards a perceived resistance from industry to report data. The main argument used is that companies do not want to release sensitive data regarding processes or technologies they use, as this could jeopardize the confidentiality of proprietary information. To address this concern, in most existing PRTR systems, facilities are allowed to claim the chemical identity of a substance to be a trade secret on their reporting forms. They must justify the need in advance, and are required to report all information under a generic name. Experience shows, however, that after the initial period, companies are not concerned about the problem for long, because the reported data is release-oriented and not product/process specific. For instance, in the UK, less than twenty confidentiality claims are made by companies annually, while the US TRI system was designed to handle a large quantity of confidential claims, but less than fifty are in fact submitted annually.
The significance of getting all affected parties involved cannot be overemphasized, because the primary feature of a PRTR should be its relevance and usefulness to a wide range of users. For example, in Canada, 2,000 stakeholders were contacted by mail and the proposed NPRI initiatives were posted on the Internet. Stakeholders, including environmental and labor organizations, all major industry associations, provincial and federal government agencies, and all reporting facilities had two months to provide initial comments.
Community education and awareness is another essential element in building a successful PRTR system. PRTR works by making information available to the public and its effectiveness will be measured by the community's understanding of the information being relayed. The most convenient way to disseminate information is through an electronic format, commonly done by placing computers loaded with the database in public areas, such as local government offices and municipal libraries, where they can be easily accessed and where staff will be on hand to assist users. Users can choose the pollutant they wish to investigate, look at maps of their residential area that show in what places and in what quantities the pollutant can be found, call up a map that will display the sources of that pollution, and then access information about its health effects.
| PRTR INFO RESOURCES |
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| The Right-to-Know Network http://www.rtk.net |
| Australian NPI http://www.erin.gov.au/portfolio/epg/npi.html |
| Guidance manual for countries willing to implement PRTR (OECD '98) |
The Internet has also been a useful tool in reaching a broader audience, and there exist several good sites presenting the information (See box). Finally, for those without access to the Internet, information is available in print. And necessarily, capacity building workshops for public interest groups need to be organized to educate the users, and an information package should be developed informing about possibilities.
In efforts to communicate the usefulness of a PRTR to governments outside the OECD, three regional workshops were planned, the first having taken place in Canberra, Australia, in June 1996, for the Asia-Pacific region. The most recent such workshop was for CEE and NIS countries, held January 15-17, 1997 in Prague, which was attended by over 100 participants from 31 countries. In order to disseminate the PRTR guidance manual, its Russian version was available at the workshop. The next regional workshop, for countries from North and South America and the Caribbean basin, will take place in Mexico in July 1997.
In concert with the publication of the guidance manual, an OECD Recommendation on implementing PRTRs was adopted by the OECD Council in February 1996, calling on OECD countries to implement a PRTR using the guidance manual. Also in 1996, the EU amended the IPPC Directive calling for member states to implement pollutant register systems (on a limited scale initially), with 1999 being the first year of reporting - obviously of interest for CEE countries involved in EU accession.
Furthermore, various forms of technical assistance are available from UN organizations. UNEP Chemicals acts as the international clearing house for PRTR information and the UN Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) provides training and guidance.
Some CEE countries have already begun to work towards developing PRTRs. A pilot project is being implemented in the Czech Republic and Hungary will be the second country in the region to start such an activity. At the Prague meeting in January, Armenia, Belarus, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Romania and Ukraine all explicitly expressed an interest in developing PRTRs.
As a result, one can expect to hear much more about PRTRs in the region in coming years.
