Are Maines toxic air pollutant control strategies working?
Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) EPA maintains a program for reporting releases and transfers of toxic chemicals to the environment known as the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI). The TRI is a database of information about releases of more than 650 toxic chemicals from manufacturing facilities throughout the US. TRI data from affected Maine facilities using, manufacturing, treating or releasing any of the listed toxic chemicals are reported to EPA on an annual basis. Although the TRI database represents only a subset of total toxic emissions, the information can be used to identify trends in the release of air toxics emissions on an annual basis. Based upon reported TRI data, Maine has reduced its air toxics emissions over 251% since 1988. US EPA National scale Assessment One tool that helps us evaluate potential human exposure to air toxics is the USEPA’s National Scale Assessment (NSA). The backbone of the NSA is EPA’s National Emissions Inventory (NEI) for HAPs. For documentation on the de
