Pulse Point Newsletter for September 30, 2000
Published by Alliance Consulting International
Partners in Environmental and Occupational Health and Safety
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MEXICO REPORTS RELEASES AND TRANSFERS OF POLLUTANTS FOR THE FIRST TIME

By Enrique Medina, MS, CIH

Need to find out how much hazardous waste is generated in Mexico or the type of industry located in a particular municipality? Now there is a source for this information available to the public. It is called the Pollution Release and Transfer Registry (PRTR).  Here are examples of some facts:

• Mexico's industry generates a total of 8 million tons of hazardous waste each year, excluding mining waste.
• The Mexico City metropolitan area emits over 444,000 tons of hydrocarbons into the air each year.
• The three largest volume dischargers of wastewater in Mexico are the sugar, chemical and petroleum industries.

The PRTR is part of the National Environmental Information System established as part of the Right-to-Know  clause in the 1996 reforms to the General Law of Ecological Equilibrium and Environmental Protection (LGEEPA). SEMARNAP was mandated to issue an annual environmental report to the nation. The PRTR also addresses a number of international commitments made by Mexico, including the 1992 Rio Accord, Agenda XXI, NAFTA's Border XXI and obligations to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

The PRTR (known in Spanish as RETC) is Mexico's version of the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) program developed in the United States, and the Canadian National Pollutant Release Inventory (NPRI). It is designed to provide the public with information on generation, emissions and discharges of listed contaminants into the air, water, and as hazardous waste. It works by compiling information supplied by generators as part of the Unified Environmental License and the annual Operating Permit (COA). These are required of all industry, hazardous waste treatment and disposal facilities, water supply and wastewater treatment plants, and other federally regulated activities.

A list of 178 pollutant substances was developed from an initial grouping of 409 substances found in a number of domestic regulations and international programs (including the TRI and NPRI), substances listed in various Official Mexican Norms (NOMs), the highly hazardous activities list, as well as the list of regulated pesticides.

The information used to develop the PRTR comes from a number of sources. Regulated facilities have been submitting environmental license applications and annual permits for several years. The annual permit application was due each February and included an emissions inventory as well as concentrations of wastewater discharge streams. Generators also file reports on hazardous waste shipped for treatment of disposal on a semi-annual basis, and facilities discharging into federal bodies of water submit periodic test results of wastewater discharge quality to the National Water Commission, which provided them for this report.

Integrating this information to ensure an acceptable level of quality and integrity was a major obstacle. A total of 2653 individual facilities from all over Mexico submitted reports, of which only 1129 or 42% were included in the PRTR database, after reviewing them for completeness, format compatibility and other criteria. The selection process is explained in the SEMARNAP report.

One significant omission involves state-regulated facilities, which represent a large percentage of all sources, especially in northern border states. These are mostly absent in the PRTR for a number of reasons, including incompatibility between federal and the state reporting forms, as well as lack of resources in some states to compile the data and submit it to SEMARNAP in a timely manner.

Unlike the TRI and NPRI, Mexico's PRTR does not report pollutant data by facility. Instead, SEMARNAP developed statistics for municipalities, states and regions, further skewing the results in favor of states with a large percentage of reporting federal sources, or those with better established state reporting mechanisms, such as the Mexico City Metropolitan Area, the states of Nuevo León, Jalisco, and tiny Tabasco, which reported a large number of Pemex oil and petrochemical facilities.

The PRTR data was used to generate 32 maps of Mexico, which graphically illustrate the results. One map shows the states that reported COA that were included in the database. Eleven maps show the location by state of federal sources by industrial sector, and 11 others by municipality. There are 7 air emission maps covering the 5 metropolitan air districts in Mexico with emissions data by total emissions, type of source (industry, services and transportation), and one each for emissions of particulates, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides and hydrocarbons. The final two maps show wastewater discharge volumes by state, and hazardous waste generation by state, using data from a 1994 report on hazardous waste minimization and management. The report lists the sources included in the report by industry type, municipality and state.

Some of the major facilities not included in the list of reporting sources include:

• 65 of 78 existing power plants operated by the Federal Electrical Commission.
• All of Pemex's major refineries and most of its major petrochemical complexes.
• Nissan and Volkswagen facilities and at least one Ford and GM plant.
• Mexico's only hazardous waste disposal facility located in Nuevo Leon.

Notwithstanding the large gaps in reporting and the consolidation of facility data into geographical and sector information, the PRTR report does contain some interesting estimates, such as:

• 63% of all hazardous waste is generated in the central region encompassing Mexico City and its eight neighboring states.
• The Border region including all of the states bordering the U.S. accounts for 62 thousand tons (less than 1%) of all hazardous waste generated annually.
• Mobile sources are the primary contributors to air pollution in Mexico, particularly carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons.

The PRTR report, contaminant lists and maps can be viewed and downloaded from the INE web site of at: www.ine.gob.mx/dggia/retc/index.html.

If you have questions about how the new environmental impact regulations may affect your current or future projects, please contact us at (619) 297-1469 or send us an email at emedina@pulse-point.com.

PP

Alliance Consulting International
Partners in Environmental and Occupational Health and Safety
3361 28th St.
San Diego, California 92104
(619)297-1469
(fax (619)297-1023
emedina@pulse-point.com
www.pulse-point.com/alliance

For articles in previous issues of Pulse Point visit our web site's "archive" section at: www.pulse-point.com/
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