2004 North American Pollutant Releases and Transfers

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The Taking Stock report is based on pollutant release and transfer registers (PRTRs) from Canada, Mexico and the United States, which provide detailed information on types, locations and amounts of chemicals released or transferred by industrial facilities. The report supports a key objective of the CEC’s goal to provide information for decision-making at all levels of society.

The publication of the eleventh edition of Taking Stock marks the achievement of a significant milestone in pollutant release and transfer register (PRTR) reporting in North America. For the first time, Taking Stock incorporates PRTR data reported by facilities in Mexico through the new Registro de Emisiones y Transferencia de Contaminantes (RETC). The Mexican data, reported in 2004 and now publicly available online, allow the annual Taking Stock report to present a more complete picture of industrial releases and transfers of chemicals in North America.

Note

As noted in the disclaimer at the beginning of this report, the national PRTR systems 'lock' their data sets on a specific date and use the 'locked' data for annual summary reports. The CEC follows a similar process: changes submitted by facilities to national PRTR data sets after the data are locked for the purposes of completing Taking Stock, are incorporated in the following year’s report. This approach is an established means to ensure the efficient comparison of national data sets on an annual basis.

The CEC is aware that changes have occurred to the data sets for the 2004 reporting year subsequent to the cut-off date for data used in this report. We wish to draw to readers’ attention a belated, but significant, data correction by Zalev Brothers, a metal recycling facility in Ontario. A September 2007 correction to a unit conversion error by this facility reduces by a thousand-fold its reported off-site releases and transfers to recycling for 2004. This change affects certain rankings presented in the report’s US/Canada analysis. As noted on pages 48 and 65 herein, without reporting by this one facility, Ontario would have ranked second in 2004 for total pollutant releases and transfers.

The CEC calls to readers’ attention this revised information because of the impact of this one facility as cited above. In the absence of an analysis of the magnitude of all data revisions submitted by North American facilities after the cut-off date for 2004, any “revised” ranking in the Taking Stock 2004 report cannot be confirmed. Please note that other key findings of the report are unaffected by this new information.