Background: PRTR Uses

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While most environmental data collected by government organizations to date have been obtained to serve governmental purposes, PRTRs are designed for broad public audiences, supporting the right of communities and individuals to know about toxic chemicals. Thus, government organizations are only one of many types of audiences for PRTR data. Others include: individuals living near industrial facilities, community groups, the press, planning bodies, regional and local governments, industrial facilities and their parent companies, emergency response organizations, investors, university researchers, insurance and other financial institutions, risk assessors, and many others.

Cataloging all uses of PRTR data -- or even the most important ones -- remains impossible, as new applications are made all the time. For example, in the United States of America, which has collected and publicly disseminated such data since 1987, most would agree that more use is made of the Toxics Release Inventory than of any other environmental database in the country. OECD's draft guidance on PRTRs (Chapter 4) identified two dozen representative uses ranging from promoting use of cleaner technology to assessing existing laws to developing data for epidemiological studies. Download this and other documents from the Catalogue of Documents.

Uses of data from current PRTRs range from general descriptions of individual facilities to quantitative analyses and summary presentations. Such data can be assessed by chemical, by facility, by environmental medium, by geography, by time, and by numerous other elements, alone or in combination. Examples that follow illustrate these applications, using data from the mid-1990s:

Local Research: England and Wales CRI Maps
Geographic Analysis: Canada NPRI Maps
Geographic Rankings: United States TRI Bar Chart
Types of Waste Management: United States TRI Pie Chart
Materials Accounting: New Jersey (U.S.)

More recent examples can be found by following the Web links in National PRTR Activities.

Last updated 12 October 1999 | http://www.chem.unep.ch/prtr/bakgd03.html