Summary

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has three projects under way to provide additional data to communities about releases of toxic chemicals from nearby manufacturing plants. Although these projects are not being designed to define comprehensively a specific community's risks, collectively, they would substantially expand the information available to communities, including data on facilities' history of compliance with environmental laws, the relative toxicity of chemical releases, and the dispersion of the releases to surrounding areas. However, each of these initiatives has a different scope and time frame for completion, and it could take years before the initiatives' full promise is realized. The availability to the public of certain data in the first of these projects was delayed because state and industry officials were concerned about the data's accuracy and how the public might interpret the information. Although data from the chemical inventory that are reported under the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act could, for example, potentially help a citizen find out which chemicals are used at a nearby plant, public use has been limited. Much of the information has not been computerized to provide easy access and when it has, it has not been available in regional or national databases that permit comparisons among industries or geographical areas. Also, EPA lacks policies, procedures, and standards to govern key aspects of its projects to disseminate information.

GAO noted that: (1) EPA has three projects under way that would provide additional data to communities on releases of toxic chemicals from nearby manufacturing facilities; (2) although these projects are not being designed to comprehensively define an individual community's risks, collectively, they would substantially expand the information available to communities; (3) in addition to the Toxic Release Inventory's (TRI) quantities of chemical releases, this information is to include data on individual facilities' history of compliance with environmental laws, the relative toxicity of chemical releases, the dispersion of the releases to surrounding areas, and the estimated concentrations of the chemicals in the outdoor air from sources not covered by the TRI; (4) however, each of these initiatives has a different scope and timeframe for completion, and it could be several years before the initiatives' full promise would be realized; (5) although the data from the chemical inventory that is reported under section 312 of the EPCRA are potentially useful for such purposes as a citizen's finding out what chemicals are used at a nearby facility, public use has been limited; (6) much of the information has not been computerized to provide easy access and when it has, it is not available in regional or national databases that permit comparisons among industries or geographical areas; (7) EPA estimates that 868,500 facilities provide local emergency planning committees, fire departments, and the states in which they are located with data on thousands of hazardous chemicals; (8) in recent years, EPA has taken some steps to assist local and state efforts to computerize the data, and two EPA regions have initiated efforts to consolidate computerized state databases; (9) while EPA believes that such efforts might prove to be worthwhile, it has not provided funding for nor assessed the potential benefits and costs of developing a national computerized database for this information; (10) EPA has not developed policies, procedures, and standards to govern key aspects of its projects to disseminate information, such as the Sector Facility Indexing Project; (11) EPA also has not developed standards to assess the data's accuracy and mechanisms to determine and correct errors; and (12) while EPA has several initiatives under way to improve its data management practices, it has no specific plans to provide its program offices with guidance for designing, developing, and implementing their information dissemination projects.