| |
|
Published in Spring 2002
|
Pollutants see the light in Mexico
|
| |
|
By Elisabeth Malkin
|
| |
|
|
For years, Mexican environmental groups have envied the access to information that their colleagues in Canada and the United States enjoyed. Inquiries about such things as smokestack emissions and waste disposal were usually met only with silence. But now that Mexico is setting up a pollutant release and transfer register (PRTR) similar to those in the other two countries, all that is about to change. “This is big news,” says Martha Delgado, president of Mexico Citizen Presence, a pro-democracy and environmental NGO based in Mexico City. “There’s a lot of openness and willingness from the government to do this.”
Under a modification to Mexico’s environmental protection law approved by Congress last December, industries will have to report a wide variety of pollutants that they either discharge or ship to waste sites. Reporting is scheduled to begin in the first quarter of 2003, for 2002 information, and will go into a national register available to the public. Included will be releases to air, water, land, and injected underground, as well as transfers off-site, in keeping with a CEC resolution encouraging site- and chemical-specific reporting.
There is a bewildering amount of work to be done to get the register up and running. The first and most important step is to write implementing regulations. “The modification to the law is so generic that we need the regulations for precision,” says Raúl Arriaga, undersecretary for Environmental Protection Management at the Environment and Natural Resources Ministry (Semarnat). Under his timetable, the regulations will be ready by August, leaving four months to distribute information and conduct workshops with industry.
It is an ambitious deadline, especially since a consultative committee of industry and NGOs, which Delgado says was promised, has yet to be convened. To start, policymakers will need to decide who has to report, the chemicals that have to be reported, the concentration levels that will trigger mandatory reporting, and how to measure the pollutants.
On top of that, Semarnat must pull together an initial list of industries—to keep track of who is not reporting—and specify penalties for noncompliance. What makes all this particularly complex is that federal authorities in Mexico only have regulatory power over the larger industrial sectors, such as chemicals and petrochemicals. States regulate a wide variety of other industries, from food to textiles. And municipalities regulate small businesses—the local dry cleaner and auto shop. Each government will need to create its own register that feeds into the federal database. Semarnat is launching workshops with state and local authorities to guide them in writing their own regulations.
“Part of the work is to figure out how large is the universe of companies,” says Arriaga. “We only have what applies to the federal government. We’re working now with the Association of State Environmental Authorities on inventories.”
While Delgado believes it is unrealistic to try to include all industries in the first register, some NGOs have begun working with smaller companies to help them prepare for the changeover. The Cooperativa Ecologista de Jalisco has held workshops in Guadalajara, Querétaro, Monterrey, and Aguascalientes; and Mexico Citizen Presence is launching a project this month to train more NGOs to work with industry.
For their part, business leaders seem to have accepted the new law, despite some predictable grumbling about confidentiality. “We have had meetings to explain what it is,” says Arriaga. “The important thing is that there’s transparency.” Delgado agrees, especially in relation to the public. The register must be accessible and useful, she says. “It must be on the Internet. The information has to be understandable—we need to know what it means, and the effects on health have to be explained.”
To read more about PRTR in Mexico, and about one state that has forged ahead on its own, please see Aguascalientes takes the initiative.
|
Top
