Website Shows Factory-By-Factory Cancer Risks In Air

Estimated cancer risks from industrial releases of toxic chemicals into the air are now available on a factory-by-factory basis, Environmental Defense announced today. The new calculations appear on the group’s Scorecard website.

Under the federal Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) program, thousands of US industrial facilities report the number of pounds of toxic chemicals they emit each year. “We’re starting to translate the raw numbers on toxic emissions into the level of health risk that they pose for people living near the source,” said Environmental Defense toxicologist Dr. Bill Pease. “It’s a translation that’s long overdue.”

The Scorecard website allows rankings of facilities by cancer risk from their air emissions at the national, state, or county level. Three facilities are tied for the country’s highest cancer risk from air emissions, based on 1997 TRI reports, each showing an added cancer risk of 1,000 per million for the surrounding population. The facilities are E.I.S. BRAKE PARTS in Manila, Arkansas; FEATHERLITE INC. in Cresco, Iowa; and ALLEGHENY LUDLUM CORP. ALLVAC LATROBE PLANT in Latrobe, Pennsylvania.

The calculations performed by Scorecard rely on each facility’s own most current TRI report, along with estimates of facility-by-facility exposures taken from the Risk Screening Environmental Indicators Project of the US Environmental Protection Agency. 1997 reports and exposure estimates are the most recent such information available to the public.

“Government itself could be providing these health-risk estimates to the public, since it has everything it needs to do the math,” said Environmental Defense attorney David Roe. “Perhaps the fact that Scorecard is now doing it will break the ice.” Roe noted that most of the nearly 6,000 individual TRI facilities for which calculations could be made did not show significant cancer risks from their air emissions of TRI chemicals.

Dr. Pease stressed the accuracy limits of the cancer-risk figures. “These are state-of-the-art statistical estimates, but not certainty,” he explained. “They are appropriately used as a gauge of progress in reducing pollution and to compare one facility’s risk level with another’s.” Any facility with its own information about the risks of its chemical emissions, including its own measurements of the public’s exposure, can post it directly on the Scorecard website, without charge, for public viewing.