Environment Canada says technological advances, coupled with tighter federal and provincial controls, point to continued reduction in total releases. It also would be nice if her department could collect and disseminate the data in a more timely fashion, but that's unlikely given the publicly popular cutbacks in the federal bureaucracy in recent years. You can bet that some of the same myopes who liked the cutbacks would be in the thick of any campaign for more current data and more immediate action. I had never really thought of myopia as a fatal affliction but in this case it clearly could be. Definitely, if you consider what kind of stuff we are talking about.
Benign elements are in a minority.
Methanol tops the latest list with releases totalling 31,180 tonnes. Ammonia is second at 29,525, followed by copper and its compounds at 14,262, xylene at 8,154 and sulphuric acid at 7,702 tonnes. The rest of the top 10 were toluene at 6,833 tonnes, zinc and compounds at 6,443, methyl ethyl ketone at 4,796, hydrochloric acid at 4,544 and ethylene glycol at 4,429. Releases were down for 17 of the 23 toxic and carcinogenic substances reported in 1995. Everyone's babbling about how to use our so-called fiscal dividend.