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 This
article originally appeared Dec. 18, 2000 in the borderlines
UPDATER (www.irc-online.org/bordline/updater/), an email-based
border news and commentary publication produced by BIOS - Border
Information and Outreach Service. BIOS is a public information
and policy analysis project based in southern New Mexico. For
more information visit www.irc-online.org.
 t wasn't the first time that I had seen pictures of
barrels labeled "toxic chemicals" abandoned clandestinely
in the Mexican desert. It wasn't the first time that I had heard
about area residents using such barrels to store drinking water.
Yet the photos and findings on alleged PCBs illegally dumped
at Nuevo Mercurio, Zacatecas, presented by university experts
at this fall's National Conference on Persistent Organic Pollutants
(POPs), held in Mexico City, curdled my blood.
According
to researchers Héctor René Vega Carrillo and Eduardo
Manzanares Acuña, of the Centro Regional de Estudios Nucleares
de la Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas, the contents
of many of the barrels were simply dumped on the ground and burned,
leaving mounds of toxic ash at the Rosicler Mine site at Nuevo
Mercurio, a poor rural community located 93 miles north of the
Zacatecas state capital.
The PCBs (polychlorinated
biphenyls) allegedly dumped at Nuevo Mercurio are among the "Dirty
Dozen" chemicals targeted for a ban proposed at the UN conference
on POPs in Johannesburg, South Africa in early December 2000.
The burning of PCBs releases dioxins, another of the Dirty Dozen.
Like all POPs, these chemicals cause death, disease, and birth
defects in humans and other animals. Easily and widely dispersed
via the air and in water, they enter the food chain and eventually
build up in the fatty substances of the body.
While a study
earlier this year sponsored by the North American Commission
for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) showed that dioxins generated
by waste burning in Mexico reach as far as the Arctic Circle,
where concentrations are high in Inuit Indian mothers' milk,
an even more recent study revealed by Greenpeace Mexico found
problems much closer to home: in Mexican butter made from Mexican
cow's milk.
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Obviously,
Mexico is not alone in its careless disposition of contaminants.
But one of the scariest, and unfortunately little-recognized,
facts about Mexico's pollution prevention policy is that the
country has absolutely no requirement whatsoever for reporting
toxic waste discharges in its territory.
This shocking
reality persists, despite post-NAFTA agreements signed under
the auspices of the trinational CEC, that Mexico would develop
a mandatory reporting system similar to the Pollution Release
and Transfer Registries (PRTRs) used in the United States and
Canada to track toxic emissions.
Without that,
the barrels of abandoned hazardous waste will continue to mount,
and so too the levels of poisons in North America's shared food,
water, and air supplies. If hazardous waste generators don't
track their outputs, they can't minimize or mitigate them. If
environmental service providers have no clear picture of the
areas of demand, they can't find their markets. If the government
has no record of who's emitting toxics -- and where, when, in
what volume, and of what kind it can't enforce laws controlling
them. And if the public has no access to the information, it
can't pressure for concrete steps to be taken to protect public
health and the environment.
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During
the recent six-year administration of Ernesto Zedillo -- the
first to govern under NAFTA, and the first to have a bona-fide
environmental ministry -- Mexican authorities launched an effort
to convince industry to voluntarily report its hazardous waste
outputs through "Annual Operation Form" reports.
Some industry
leaders, such as Nissan Mexicana and Dupont de México,
which use environmental management systems and have ISO 140001
certification, willingly submitted the information. What's more,
they advocate mandatory compliance.
Says Nissan
Environmental Control and Energies Superintendent José
Campos García: "We have no problem with the idea
of mandatory reporting. Rather than affecting us, reporting benefits
us, because it shows us as an example." Dupont Safety, Health,
and Environment Manager Carlos Gaitán agrees: "I
personally find a lot of benefit in reporting everything together,
in having a database and an inventory."
But many companies
-- especially smaller ones that lack resources for training in
environmental management -- are reticent to participate in the
voluntary reporting system, partly for fear that it will reflect
badly on them. Only 1,129 of the 2,653 industries licensed by
Mexico's National Ecology Institute (INE) in the 1997-1998 period
reported on the nature of their dangerous emissions, according
to the First National Progress Report on the Registry of Emissions
and Transfer of Contaminants (RETC) concluded by the INE in January
2000.
"We don't
obtain very reliable results," says Hilda Martínez
Salgado, INE's chief of environmental projects in the Zedillo
administration.
Nonetheless,
INE bowed to anti-RETC forces in its proposal for rules on RETC
reporting published in Mexico's Diario Oficial de la República
in September 2000: That proposal calls for only voluntary and
confidential reporting.
In the required
60-day public comment period on the proposal, INE received dozens
of submissions from NGO representatives demanding that the rules
include mandatory reporting, as well as public access to names
and addresses of toxics generators, and measures to ensure RETC
conformity with US and Canadian PRTRs. By law, authorities now
must respond publicly to the submissions before dictating the
final rules.
Meanwhile,
as Mexico falls further and further behind its northern neighbors
in reporting its hazardous waste, the CEC increasingly is pumping
up its support for efforts to reverse the trend.
The CEC has
helped fund numerous projects, using money from the three federal
governments it comprises. Some of the results:
- INE coordinated a pilot project for a voluntary
RETC in the central state of Queretaro, involving 80 of the 1,227
industries there -- but gleaned reports from only 39.
- A dozen Mexican states are developing their
own mandatory pollution reporting schemes, a step that should
nudge forward the system on the federal plane, according to CEC
Technical Cooperation Program Manager Erica Phipps.
- The Agua Prieta, Sonora NGO Enlace Ecológico
has been trying since 1987 to involve the community in establishing
a local RETC, and after several attempts, only now has achieved
the consensus for a mandatory registry of 34 industries.
- In San Diego-Tijuana, the Environmental Health
Coalition tried to get 20 companies from Tijuana's largest industrial
complex to report their chemical use, but ended up with partial
reports from only eight, and now is working with just three to
demonstrate, through outside consultants, that pollution reporting
identifies opportunities for prevention that are cheaper than
tail-end damage control.
- Mexico City-based Emisiones Espacio Virtual
del Programa LaNeta is operating an Internet-based clearinghouse
for NGOs to improve access to information on toxics and PRTR
potential in Mexico.
- The CEC's Fund to Support Pollution Prevention
Projects is making incentive loans for training to small and
midsize businesses that report their hazardous discharges. Twelve
loans have been approved and 16 are in the pipeline. But with
those, all available money has been used or earmarked, while
a much greater demand exists, according to CEC Consultant Arturo
Rodríguez Abitia.
- Last November, the CEC brought together dozens
of representatives of various sectors to a forum in Tijuana entitled
"Forging Alliances to Prevent Industrial Pollution."
At the conference, debate flourished on the comparative benefits
of voluntary and mandatory reporting in Mexico -- as well it
might, given that enforcement of required environmental measures
is notoriously lax nationwide, effectively reducing obligatory
actions to the status of voluntary.
Federal
Environmental Prosecutor's representative Jaime Garcia Sepúlveda
told conference participants that the federal Clean Production
Program, an alternative effort which certifies industries that
participate in a Voluntary Environmental Audit scheme, has convinced
1,703 industries to clean up their acts while sheltering them
from sanctions. (The approval of regulations institutionalizing
the voluntary audit system for companies that opt to use it was
announced by environmental authorities several days later.)
One attendee
took the microphone to remind conference attendees that some
of the greatest works of humankind have been voluntary, but Paul
Orum, director of the Washington, DC-based Working Group on Community
Right-to-Know met that statement with skepticism. "I know
of no voluntary system," he told listeners, "where
there's been success: Voluntary right-to-know initiatives always
fail."
Orum cited
several examples, such as a 1994 instance in which the US EPA
and the state of California separately requested pollutant release
data from US-owned facilities operating in Mexico. Less than
a dozen responded, despite the stature of the governments behind
the request, he said.
Orum's organization
calculates that, based on CEC studies, only 5 percent of industries
in Mexico report their release data.
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Clearly,
if Mexico hopes to achieve a credible RETC, serious work will
need to occur on many different fronts. Pressure and assistance
from the CEC and the other NAFTA governments can help, but will
need to occur in a way that respects Mexico's sovereignty and
special concerns. Within Mexico, inter-sector cooperation, financial
incentives, environmental education and training for academics
and business, public pressure, massive information distribution,
and strong government policy are among the top prerequisites
for reaching the goal. Ultimately, the Mexican government will
have to choose to take this route -- pressure from civil society
can help lead them toward that decision.
"PRTRs
are here to stay and will become increasingly important worldwide,"
says the CEC's Erica Phipps.
Green groups
in Mexico are saying the same thing.
Now Mexico's
new government just has to accept it. 
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