Based on her many years of experience meeting with officials at the Lima, Ohio BP facility, one citizen activist advocated that all industrial facilities should cover the cost of such a third party technical expert for the community. She added that it should be part of the cost of every plant doing business in a community. One value is that this person is a reliable and believable source of information on plant performance. Quantitative measures of plant performance over time What gets measured gets managed - but what gets measured and shared with public gets managed faster. The Toxic Release Inventory has been a perfect example - emissions cut in half over 8 years simply because emissions are publicly reported, plant by plant, chemical by chemical.
Reductions are voluntary.
While emissions are an important metric, a facility's chemical use performance can be measured more fully by adding other measures over time such as the total amount of each industrial substance shipped to or from the facility through the community's roadways, waterways, and railways as or in products, the total amount used, consumed, and generated as waste per unit of production from year to year. Such measures are indicators of facility performance and are thus not only good for environmental health, but are indicators of business health as well. I would also add that these indicators are crucial for the Council on Sustainable Development or any other group to measure our industrial society's progress towards sustainability. There are over 70,000 chemicals registered in the US for commercial use, yet the human and environmental health impacts of the vast majority of these substances, especially in the case of multiple chemical exposures, are largely unknown. So it might make sense to at least put the public spotlight on the flow of these chemicals as they move through the chain of commerce, from extractive industries, to chemical synthesizers, product manufacturers, product users, and finally to product disposal.