Toxic Release Inventory Analysis

Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) analysis uses mandatory facility-level reports of industrial chemical releases to measure how the burden of toxic pollution is distributed across social groups. Rather than counting raw pounds of emissions, which treat a ton of an innocuous solvent the same as a ton of a potent carcinogen, the modern approach weights releases by toxicity and models how they disperse to populations. Michael Ash and T. Robert Fetter's 2004 study showed how the EPA's Risk-Screening Environmental Indicators (RSEI) model, built on TRI, can be used to assign toxicity- and exposure-weighted pollution to neighborhoods and to test for disparities. They found consistent income and racial gradients: lower-income people and African Americans are exposed to more industrial air pollution, both across and within cities. The analysis combines the spatial-disparity logic of environmental justice with a chemical-specific account of harm. The result is a far more defensible burden measure than emission counts alone.