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3 Reducing Toxic Releases and Community Risks One of the most striking developments upon the implementation of the Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act (SARA) and release of the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) was the flurry of announcements from major corporations suddenly attuned to new public expectations for coming clean, that is, for improvements in environmental performance and transparency in release of toxic chemicals. One company that received more press attention than most others was Monsanto. In the early 1990s it was a leading chemical manufacturer and today it is one of the largest and most prominent agricultural biotechnology corporations in the world. In 1988, the first year of reporting for the TRI, Monsanto officials realized that the very large number they would soon be reporting could be detrimental to the company’s reputation. They chose to head off the expected negative publicity over those numbers by initiating a voluntary emissions-reduction program. The company’s CEO, Richard Mahoney, publicly embraced the goal of corporate pollution reduction, and announced that his company was determined to cut its toxic air emissions by over 90 percent within five years. And it did so ahead of the target date after spending some $100 million on the effort (Dahl 1997). These kinds of changes are by no means confined to the nation’s largest and best known chemical companies such as Monsanto. Striking examples abound of comparable changes in toxic releases within facilities between 1988 (the first year of TRI reporting) and 2007 (U.S. EPA 2009). Overall trends are impressive, with a drop from 3 billion pounds of releases (counting only core chemicals) to 1.2 billion pounds. Specific facilities offer an even more dramatic picture. Between 1988 and 2007, Cytec Industries, located in Jefferson County, Louisiana, decreased its releases by 70 percent, dropping from 28.4 million pounds to 8.4 million pounds. Similarly, Eastman Kodak in Monroe County, New York, went 54 Chapter 3 from 18.1 million pounds of toxics to less than 1 million pounds, a drop of almost 95 percent in total releases. Some of the most significant improvements occurred in the earliest years of the program, between 1988 and 1991. For example, Invista, a facility in New Hanover County, North Carolina, reduced its toxic releases from 25.6 million pounds in 1988 to 3.6 million in 1989—a drop of roughly 85 percent in only one year’s time. In part because of these early successes, in February 1991 the EPA began a related initiative, the voluntary 33/50 Program that sought to decrease industrial releases of 17 high-priority (highly toxic or widely used) chemicals by 33 percent below a 1988 baseline by the end of 1992 and by 50 percent by 1995. The EPA eventually invited some 8,000 companies to participate in the program, and about 1,300 did so, representing more than 6,000 facilities. The EPA reported that the companies succeeded in reducing toxic releases of the 17 chemicals by 46 percent by 1993 and 60 percent by 1996. Critics have long observed that some of the reported reductions actually took place before the program began, some were made by companies that were not participants in the program, and some were probably not directly attributable to the program itself. Still, the relative success of the initiative boosted confidence in what voluntary pollution prevention programs might be able to achieve (Coglianese 2010; Dahl 1997; Gamper-Rabindran 2006; O’Toole et al. 1997; Press and Mazmanian 2010). Based on seemingly favorable improvements in environmental performance , the TRI program in particular has been much praised, by the U.S. EPA, state and federal policymakers, students of public policy, and environmental groups (such as the Environmental Defense Fund and OMB Watch) that have made the database widely available. The data also have been used to identify and respond to environmental justice issues since they facilitate an understanding of how toxic chemical releases and risk levels vary from one community to another, including communities with large concentrations of minorities or low-income populations . Policy scholars continue to cite the TRI program as perhaps the premier example of a federal nonregulatory environmental policy that has worked fairly well (Graham and Miller 2001; Hamilton 2005; Press and Mazmanian 2010). In this chapter we review the record of the TRI’s achievements as well as its shortcomings. We report on the quantitative analysis of our data, which focuses on changes over time in our sample...

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