Giant Step For Public's Right-To-Know About Chemical Hazards

A unique new Internet service, launched today, allows anyone in the US to see chemical pollution sources and hazards in sharp detail on local street maps of his or her own community — and send queries straight to the sources themselves.

“This is the first glimpse of what public right-to-know will be like in the 21st century,” said Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) executive director Fred Krupp, announcing the launch of the EDF Chemical Scorecard information service on the Internet. “It’s a giant step toward making the facts about local pollution — and the uncertainties — as easy to get as a local weather report, and as much a part of people’s everyday resources.”

The EDF Chemical Scorecard (www.scorecard.org) is free to all users. It includes full information on the health effects of individual polluting chemicals, as well as instant rankings based on pollution loads and health hazards for 17,000 polluting facilities, for 2,000 counties, and for every state.

A user would find out with a few mouse-clicks that, for the US as a whole:

—the recognized carcinogen with the highest releases into the environment is dichloromethane and the recognized developmental toxin with highest releases is toluene (all other pollutants also listed in order, by volume and by hazard category);
—81% of the chemicals being released to air don’t have enough information in the public record to be able to assess their risks to human health;
—the two top-volume polluting facilities in terms of total releases to the environment are Magnesium Corp. of America in Rowley, Utah, and Asarco Inc. in East Helena, Montana (all others listed in order; also shows top emitters in 12 different categories of health hazards).