As we have heard from other participants, people need a wide range of environmental information. Libraries are an important point of public access, through Internet work stations and other resources.
In general, I think that people need:
1. Integrated information -- Clearly, integrating current data reporting systems is an underlying challenge for states and EPA.
2. Solutions information -- Government, industry, and the public need information on solutions, not just more study of problems.
3. Organized information -- Common sense ways that people search for information include: by location, pollution source, parent company, industry, chemical and regulatory requirement (the "key identifiers").
4. Complete information -- Full disclosure "sunshine principles" honor the public's right-to-know about environmental issues that can affect us where we live, work, play, or go to school.
5. Successful information models -- The Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) is successful because any person can obtain information that is facility specific, "multi-media" (meaning air, land, and water), designed for data management, chemical specific, public, and not restricted by unecessary trade secrecy claims.
Using these principles, EPA could enable people to answer many or most of the following basic questions on their own:
[O] What toxic ingredients are in pesticide and other products I buy, including toxic "inert" ingredients?
[O] What pollution sources and hazards exist near my home, work, or school?
[O] What regulated and unregulated contaminants are in my drinking water?
[O] What indoor air pollution comes from the building materials and products in my home and workplace?
[O] What government agency regulates pollution and how?
[O] What prevention alternatives exist to reduce pollution at the source?
[O] What safer alternaties are used elsewhere at similar facilities?
[O] How will cleaner production alternatives affect workers?
[O] What sources of technical support exist to help me?
[O] How can I get information on a single facility from a single source, instead of from many fragmented databases?
[O] What are the known hazards of a given chemical?
[O] What are the unknown hazards of a given chemical?
[O] Where can I find exposure data, disease registries, census data, labor data, hospital admissions, weather data, etc?
[O] What permit hearings and other developments will impact me?
[O] Where can I get complete information on spills and accidents?
[O] Where and by what routes do people transport hazardous waste?
[O] How are my property values affected by industrial hazards?
[O] How can my community verify reported information?
[O] What does EPA do to verify reported information?
[O] Does government have complete information about polluting industries, including facilities, parent companies, and safer alternatives?
[O] How will a company or agency clean up a given pollution site?
[O] What beach closures and fish advisories exist for this water?
[O] Are there genetically modified or irradiated ingredients in a given food product that I want to buy?
There are of course many other questions.
Paul Orum
Working Group on Community Right-to-Know
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