title: The Impact of Pollution Prevention on Toxic Environmental Releases from U.S. Manufacturing Facilities.
abstract: Between 1991 and 2012, the facilities that reported to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) Program conducted 370,000 source reduction projects. We use this data set to conduct the first quasi-experimental retrospective evaluation of how implementing a source reduction (pollution prevention) project affects the quantity of toxic chemicals released to the environment by an average industrial facility. We use a differences-in-differences methodology, which measures how implementing a source reduction project affects a facility's releases of targeted chemicals, relative to releases of (a) other untargeted chemicals from the same facility, or (b) the same chemical from other facilities in the same industry. We find that the average source reduction project causes a 9-16% decrease in releases of targeted chemicals in the year of implementation. Source reduction techniques vary in effectiveness: for example, raw material modification causes a large decrease in releases, while inventory control has no detectable effect. Our analysis suggests that in aggregate, the source reduction projects carried out in the U.S. since 1991 have prevented between 5 and 14 billion pounds of toxic releases.
authors.affiliation: Abt Associates Inc., 55 Wheeler Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, United States.
authors.forename: Matthew
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Ranson
authors.affiliation: Abt Associates Inc., 55 Wheeler Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, United States.
authors.forename: Brendan
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Cox
authors.affiliation: Abt Associates Inc., 55 Wheeler Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, United States.
authors.forename: Cheryl
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Keenan
authors.affiliation: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Toxics Release Inventory Program, Mail Code 2844T, 1200 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, D.C. 20460, United States.
authors.forename: Daniel
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Teitelbaum
mesh_terms: D054750:Ecotoxicology / Q000379:methods; D004777:Environment; D004787:Environmental Pollution / Q000517:prevention & control* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D006801:Humans; D007221:Industry; D012189:Retrospective Studies; D014481:United States; D014484:United States Environmental Protection Agency