Industrial facilities across the United States released more than 200 million pounds of toxic chemicals into our nation’s waterways in 2009. Many of these chemicals are known to increase the risk of cancer, reproductive and developmental problems, and a range of other health issues. In addition to chemicals known to be toxic, industry used and disposed of tens of thousands of other chemicals that have not been evaluated and whose potential risks to human health are thus unknown.
Federal law requires most but not all industrial facilities to report releases into the environment of about 650 chemicals that are known to be toxic. Through the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) provides public access to the resulting data on industrial chemical releases.
The EPA’s Risk-Screening Environmental Indicators (RSEI) model is useful for adding meaning to the TRI data, making it possible to assess the risks to human health posed by facilities releasing toxic chemicals. Assessing such risks depends on the quantity of chemical released, the toxicity of the chemical and the likelihood of human exposure to the chemical or its byproducts. As a first step, a human health hazard score associated with the releases of toxic chemicals from a given facility can be calculated using the RSEI model; this is before factoring in the chance of actual human exposure to the hazard created by a release.
In this report, 2009 TRI data and the RSEI model are used to identify the entities most responsible for the total human health hazard from industrial water pollution in the United States. The report is based on data compiled in the Toxic 100 Water Polluters Index. The report shows that leading energy and chemical manufacturing companies a
