Community “Right to Know”

In 1986, the U.S. Congress passed the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (EPCRA). Though it was debated and passed as a stand-alone law, it ended up packaged as part of another 1986 law, the Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act (SARA). The act is [Page 171]known either as EPCRA or as SARA Title III. This vitally important act mandates public communication of information regarding the release of toxic chemicals into the environment, creates an important resource for both the public and journalists regarding these releases, and demonstrates the power of making environmental information available.

The new law was billed as a response to two emergencies, the catastrophic 1984 chemical release at a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, and a distressingly similar but not catastrophic 1985 release at Union Carbide's facility in Institute, West Virginia. As befits its focus on chemical emergencies, EPCRA set up a network of State Emergency Response Commissions and Local Emergency Planning Committees, and it obligated every individual facility deemed capable of launching a chemical emergency to develop its own emergency response plan.

But the best-known part of EPCRA had very little to do with emergency planning. Section 313 required the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to establish a Toxics Release Inventory (TRI), a nationwide list of routine chemical releases to air, land, and water from every covered factory, power plant, and so forth. Facilities have to file their TRI reports annually. A couple of years later, EPA releases the data to the public—not only the totals, but also the raw numbers for every facility in the country. Interested citizens can get chapter and verse on releases from any facility or geographical area of any chemical that is covered.

Section 313 is the community right-to-know part of EPCRA. Importantly, Section 313 does nothing—absolutely nothing—to regulate chemical emissions. It is not about controlling what gets emitted; it is exclusively about communicating what gets emitted. Nonetheless, its effects have been little short of revolutionary. And because those effects are publicity driven and market driven, they are in many respects immune to the ebb and flow of regulatory fervor in Washington, D.C. Even during the environmentally lax presidency of George W. Bush, the annual TRI obligation continued to exert strong pressure on companies to reduce their reportable emissions.

In the two decades since EPCRA became law, U.S. environmental activists have gotten used to the annual flood of TRI data. They tend to focus more on the (genuine) flaws of Section 313 than on its extraordinary mandate of transparency. But it has arguably been one of the most effective environmental laws ever.

There is a lesson here for other areas of environmental regulation: When companies are doing things the public disapproves of, it may not be necessary to make them stop directly. It may be sufficient to make them tell and to let the public make them stop. Of course, addressing a problem such as global warming requires a lot more than just expanding TRI to cover greenhouse gases. But that would surely be a useful, easy, and early step.

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