Taking Stock: North American Pollutant Releases and Transfers

In our last report, Taking Stock, Vol. 13 (published in April 2011), we analyzed data for 2006, the most recent available data from the three countries at the time of writing. Since then, the North American PRTR programs have achieved comparable data publication schedules and the CEC has thus integrated three additional years of data, through 2009. In this overview we provide a brief summary of this latest data year, along with some observations about changes in reporting since 2006. Additional data and analyses will be provided in the full Taking Stock report to be published later this year.

Try the enhanced features of Taking Stock Online, the integrated, North American PRTR Database: The Taking Stock Online tools allow you to explore information on pollution from industrial facilities across North America. Create summary charts, customized queries and download your results in a variety of formats, including kml files for viewing in Google Earth and Google Maps.

Overview of Taking Stock 2009 data

The data used in Taking Stock are obtained from Canada’s National Pollutant Release Inventory (NPRI) Mexico's Registro de Emisiones y Transferencia de Contaminantes (RETC), and the UnitedStates' Toxics Release Inventory (TRI).

The national PRTR systems are constantly evolving, as facilities revise previous submissions to correctreporting errors or make other changes. For Taking Stock, the NPRI, RETC and TRI data sets as of December 2010 were used. The CEC is aware that changes might have occurred to the data sets subsequentto the official release of the 2009 data that are not reflected in Taking Stock. Readers can visit the nationalPRTR websites to see if any changes to the data have occurred.