| |
|
Published in Spring 2002
|
Aguascalientes takes the initiative
|
| |
|
By Talli Nauman
|
| |
|
|
When Miguel Ángel Torres requested information for his research grant on the environmental impact of textile companies in Aguascalientes, state authorities provided him emissions data that no other state government could. That’s because Aguascalientes is the only one of Mexico’s 32 states with its own working pollutant release and transfer register (PRTR). “I am glad my grant was for research in Aguascalientes,” says Torres, an economist at the National Statistics, Geography, and Data Processing Institute.
Now in its third year of operation, the mandatory reporting system offers comparative data from the nine industries under state jurisdiction—from textiles to printing to baking—which account for 75 percent of the fixed pollution sources in the state.
Data is collected for 160 contaminants, 56 more than in the currently voluntary federal register. Another advance is that it packages the information in an accessible format, with user-friendly photos and summary profiles of individual plants.
For the moment, Aguascalientes’s register covers 175 businesses, though that number will grow under reforms to the federal environmental law. The reforms not only require that Mexico’s national PRTR become mandatory and public for all industries—whether under federal, state, or municipal jurisdiction—but they continue a move to decentralize authority over environmental matters. What this means for PRTR is that states with the capability will assume certain federal responsibilities, including registering federally-regulated industries located within their borders. In Aguascalientes, that could raise the number of registered enterprises to about 700. The range of substances for industries under federal jurisdiction remains to be determined.
“The PRTR is one of the reasons we want decen-tralization,” says Marco Antonio Acero Varela, head of Aguascalientes’s Ecology Undersecretariat.
Once Aguascalientes takes over the new industries, according to state officials, it will be able to release that data without federal permission, use it to build an exchange bank for firms trading their waste products for recycling, and improve local inspection and enforcement efforts. Toward that end, the federal government has agreed to chip in about US$14,000 of the state’s $23,000 PRTR budget this year. Other states are receiving help as well, keyed to the size of their individual projects: US$10,000 for Colima; $17,000 for Durango; $17,000 for Michoacán; $4,800 for San Luis Potosí; and $6,000 for Tlaxcala.
Aguascalientes will be the first state to take on the new responsibilities, says Raúl Arriaga, the environmental undersecretary at Semarnat. The changeover is expected within a year, beginning with automobile manufacturing, the state’s largest industrial sector, according to Armando Aguayo Patiño, environmental verification chief for the Ecology Undersecretariat. State authorities are hoping to establish a regional database by sharing their mandatory reporting system with neighboring states. So far, they have done so with officials in Durango, Colima, Guanajuato, the state of Mexico, Tamaulipas, and Yucatán.
“All we ask is that they ask us for it,” says Aguayo.
|
Top
Talli Nauman 