USEPA statistics put mining in a bad light Please release me

Horrors! Those hideous mining barons are at it again. How can they be so callous?

When they’re not suffering from the vapors over Iraqi quagmires and museum lootings, speculating on which ex-spouse will be first to be knifed on the next Big Brother, or phoning in stories datelined St. Louis from bars in lower Manhattan, reporters for large American dailies and wire services will sometimes take a break by poring over the annual statistics from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Toxics Release Inventory (TRI). This compilation serves as a sort of numerical rap sheet for the heavy industries of the United States, providing columns of figures on how much poison the evil captains of industry have dumped out over the pristine American landscape.

The EPA’s own executive summary of the Inventory is admirably clinical; it’s mainly just tables showing total releases, broken down by region, industrial sector, or chemical class. The definition of “release,” though, has expanded somewhat since the 1986 passage of the Emergency Planning and Community Right to Know Act. The Act was the U.S. Congress’s response to the disastrous leak of methyl isocyanate gas from the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, in 1984; the intent was that dangerous chemicals in industrial use be inventoried to allow governments to monitor safety procedures.

It was under a later act, the Pollution Prevention Act of 1990, that Congress directed industries to account for releases of “chemicals” to the environment. The popular idea of a “release” is the disposal of a dangerous substance, in untreated form, direct to nature. The act takes a rather broader view.

In the mining sphere, ever since 1998, the movement of naturally occurring materials out of mines and into waste rock dumps and tailings ponds has been a “release” for the purposes of the TRI. The result is predictable enough: each year the EPA can report that metal mining is the sector that releases the greatest amount of toxic chemicals — 45% in 2001, if you’re counting.

But scratch that figure — the only one that gets reported by the mainstream media — and you’ll find that 99% of the “2.8 billion pounds” of toxics released by the metal mining industry was milled tailings and waste rock. So while the dullards of the press provide the public with a picture of 2.8 billion pounds of poison potions going out the drainpipe at mines across the West, what is really happening is some large-scale earthmoving.

The EPA makes a half-hearted attempt to set this straight in its backgrounders, noting that “release estimates alone are not sufficient . . . to calculate potential adverse effects on human health and the environment.” But anyone with some experience of the press knows that general-assignment reporters have little of the patience, and none of the knowledge, required to digest the facts. So the picture that appears is quite different from the reality on the ground.

One other point worth bringing in at this stage is the EPA’s choice of measurement unit. Millions of pounds of anything sound a whole lot more menacing than thousands of tons (or tonnes, if the Americans would at last get with the program on coherent measurement systems). It’s rather like those diamond explorers in the Northwest Territories who report the size of their properties in thousands, and even millions, of acres, simply to inflate the reader’s idea of how much ground they’ve got.

It is hard not to fear that the agency is using “big number” psychology of the same kind to sell the idea that the environment is in danger and the EPA must be funded to the hilt.

So how did mining do in this year’s Shame List? Lo! Bingham Canyon’s name led all the rest! Kennecott’s big open-pit copper mine was the biggest single source of toxic releases in the TRI, producing a monstrous 695 million pounds of them. Second came Teck Cominco’s Red Dog mine in Alaska, despoiling the picturesque Kotzebue Peninsula with a massive 432 million tons. (It is unnecessary, at this stage, to explain why “copper and zinc compounds” were the chemicals with the largest total releases in 2001.)

Teck aren’t the only Ugly Canadians on the Top Ten Toxic Tycoons list. Barrick’s Goldstrike mine comes in third, while those almost-Canadians at Newmont take fourth and fifth spot, thanks to Carlin and Twin Creeks.

Home-grown Phelps Dodge and those sinister Mexicans from Asarco round out the rest of the TRI’s list, which carries not one single representative from any other industry.

It would be nice if the public understood the real meaning. Unfortunately, they’re unlikely to get the whole story, from the mainstream press or from EPA.