The Pitfalls of the Environmental Right-to-Know

Would you want your family to live near a plant containing acetone, acetaldehyde, methylbutyrate, ethylcaproate, hexylacetate, methanol, acrolein, and croton aldehyde? Perhaps not. Responding to Americans' fears of exposure to scary-sounding and possibly dangerous chemicals, and prompted by a few high-profile industrial accidents, Congress in 1986 adopted a far-reaching system of chemical-release reporting dubbed the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI).' Some states have adopted environmental information programs of their own.