'Misfortune 100' Identifies Top Air Polluters in United States

    Political Economy Research Institute

19 November 2004

    A list of the top 100 corporate air polluters in the United States has been released by the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Topping the list is Dana Corporation, a Toledo-based manufacturer of automotive products. General Electric Company ranks second, and Georgia-Pacific Corporation is third on the list. (Click here for complete table.)

    The 'Misfortune 100' index is based on air releases of hundreds of toxic chemicals from industrial facilities located across the United States. The rankings take into account not only the quantity of releases, but also the relative toxicity of different chemicals and the number of people at risk.

    The data are based on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) for the year 2000. The inventory was established by Congress after the 1984 chemical disaster in Bhopal, India, at a plant owned by the now-defunct Union Carbide Corporation. The TRI data include both deliberate and accidental releases of toxic chemicals in the United States.

    The TRI data have been widely cited in press accounts that identify the "top polluters" in various states and localities. But prior reports were subject to three key limitations:  

• First, the raw TRI data are reported simply in total pounds of chemicals, without taking into account differences in toxicity. Yet pound-for-pound, some chemicals are up to ten million times more hazardous than others.
• Second, the raw TRI data do not take account of the numbers of people impacted by toxic releases - for example, the difference between facilities that are upwind from densely populated urban areas as opposed to those located far from population centers.
• Third, the TRI data are reported on a facility-by-facility basis, without combining different plants owned by the same corporation to get a picture of overall corporate performance.

    The Misfortune 100 index tackles all three problems. It includes toxicity weights and the number of people at risk - taking into account smokestack heights, prevailing wind patterns, local topography, and population density - using data from the EPA's Risk-Screening Environmental Indicators project. PERI researchers added up facility-by-facility data from the EPA to get corporate rankings.

    Accounting for differences in toxicity and the numbers of people impacted dramatically alters the rankings. In terms of sheer pounds, for example, Atlanta-based Southern Company released 78 times as much air pollution as top-ranked Dana Corporation; yet once toxicity and population are taken into account, Southern Company ranks far behind, placing 57th on the list.

    The Misfortune 100 index identifies the top air polluters among all corporations that appear in the Fortune 500, Forbes 500, and Standard & Poor's 500 lists of the country's largest firms. Rounding out the top ten on the Misfortune 100 list are Eastman Kodak, Boeing, US Steel, Dow Chemical, Eastman Chemical, ConocoPhillips, and DuPont.

    "By making this information available, we are building on the achievements of the right-to-know movement," explains James K. Boyce, director of PERI's environment program. "Our goal is to engender public participation in environmental decision-making, and to help people translate the right to know into the right to clean air."

    The Misfortune 100 index is a product of PERI's Corporate Toxics Information Project. The Institute also is developing an index that will measure the extent to which toxic releases place disproportionate pollution burdens on people of color and low-income communities.

For further information, contact: boyce@econs.umass.edu.

http://www.umass.edu/peri/resources/Misfortune100.htm