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 Editorials | At Issue | August 2005 
Information Access First Step In Controlling Toxic Waste
 Talli Nauman - The Herald Mexico
Could somebody please get the message to the new environment secretary in Mexico? Local communities will not accept hazardous waste confinement sites until residents have: 1) access to information about the toxics being released from factories in local areas, 2) proof that factory operators are reducing the dangerous inputs in their production, 3) participation in the decision-making about site locations, 4) assurance of open bidding processes for the infrastructure development, and 5) guarantees of developers' responsibility for anything that goes wrong with the facilities.
Once José Luis Luege Tamargo, the recently appointed head of the Environment and Natural Resources Secretariat (Semarnat), gets that message, could somebody also please pass along another one? Authorities cannot determine locations for confinement sites, much less promote public financing of them, until the first five prerequisites are achieved.
What prompted me to make this plea were Luege's comments this month to the effect that only an increase in the number of hazardous waste confinement sites can prevent toxic dumping and related health risks in the countryside.
His comments were addressed to state and city authorities during the Aug. 3 National Forum on the Basil, Rotterdam and Stockholm Conventions on Dangerous Chemical Substances, which was a good and responsible event for Semarnat to sponsor. But Luege's words unwittingly mock the underlying principles of the U.N. conventions and repeat erroneous statements made by his predecessors at the environment secretariat.
Mr. Secretary, if I could get your attention, I would tell you that only implementation of a Pollutant Release and Transfer Register (PRTR) in the current administration of President Vicente Fox can prevent toxic dumping and related health risks in the countryside.
The Mexican PRTR, a measure under development for 10 years, would require factories to report the amount and kind of toxic discharges to air, land and soil for an annually updated public inventory. All Semarnat has left to do in order to make that a reality is set the standards by which chemicals must be reported on a mandatory basis.
If Luege's secretariat doesn't lay out those standards before he is replaced by the next administration, a decade of efforts will go down the drain, and society will have to return to the drawing board to obtain environmental information access guarantees, as happened at the conclusion of presidential terms in the past.
Luege asked state and city authorities to back his demand for more confinement sites, when he really should have been asking them to back civil society's demand for the toxics register.
It's no accident that Mexico has only one commercial toxic waste confinement site open to the public and no reliable statistics on how much hazardous pollution its industrial sites emit. It's no mystery why Luege, like the three secretaries before him, mouths the same concocted estimate of 8 million tons a year of dangerous residues released.
The country simply does not have a mandatory, public reporting system for its production facilities, like that in the United States and Canada, with whom it has repeatedly ratified agreements for a comparable accounting method.
The other commercial confinement sites that operated in former administrations were closed for violating the few rules applicable. The main examples, in Hermosillo, Sonora, and La Pedrera, San Luis Potosi, are now sore spots because the foreign investors successfully sued Mexico for closing them and the government is passing along the cleanup bill to taxpayers instead of the companies that made the mess.
Luege is to be lauded for testifying at the forum in favor of promoting a culture of the three "r"s in Mexico: reducing toxic inputs, reusing materials and recycling. But ensuring enforceable legal measures is necessary to promote that.
The most readily available measures are the PRTR rules. Once the pollutant register is accessible and once the government assures the other ground rules for confinement sites, Luege and his successors will no longer have to complain, as he did at the forum, that people oppose the sites due to being poorly informed.
Talli Nauman is a founder and co-director of Journalism to Raise Environmental Awareness, a project initiated with support from the MacArthur Foundation. She is the Americas Program Associate at the International Relations Center. (talli@direcway.com) |
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