The arsenal of weapons against the top corporate polluters in the United States just got bigger.
On Wednesday, the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) launched the Chemical Scorecard, an innovative Web site that allows netsurfers to access detailed information about the hazardous chemicals threatening the health of their neighborhoods.
By entering a zip code, the site will generate a map of polluters in a given area. By drawing from more than 150 databases of scientific, geographic, and legal information, the Chemical Scorecard organizes more than 750 Mb of research and analysis on toxics use in the United States into a form that's easy to comprehend. More than 5000 dangerous compounds are profiled and ranked, from abietic acid (a suspected skin toxicant) to ZR-97 (a confirmed carcinogen).
The interface can be customized, so if you're a pregnant woman, you can ask the Scorecard to rank the chemicals in your area that will be especially hazardous to you.
The site offers ways of taking action against polluters, from a free fax service enabling visitors to communicate directly with the worst offenders, to resources for community organizing, to a form for sending email to the Environmental Protection Agency.
"You know where you live. That's all you need to know to do something about pollution in your community," says Bill Pease, EDF staff toxicologist and content manager for the Scorecard. By "making the chemical names relevant to people," Pease says his organization hopes to inspire the kind of public pressure that results in voluntary action by companies -- or punitive action by regulatory agencies.
"Once you start disclosing information, companies basically squirm," Pease explains. "They want to get out of the spotlight. It might take a regulator 20 years to get the kind of action that this type of disclosure can cause."
The deployment of data on the Scorecard is so effective, Pease predicts, even the offending companies will consult it. The site was developed by Philip Greenspun of ArsDigita, creator of photo.net and the Bill Gates Wealth Clock. The idea, says Greenspun, was to take crucial information about toxics "from the potentially useful and interesting to the actually useful and interesting."
Jonah Seiger, the co-founder of Mindshare -- a new-media political strategy consulting firm in Washington, DC -- calls Scorecard one of the "next generation of Web sites" that will use databases and interactivity to "help people to understand complex information in a very personal way" by such methods as the use of maps on the site.
While not convinced that bombarding federal agencies like the EPA with email is an effective lobbying technique -- Seiger calls that approach "email as projectile weapon" -- he praises the Scorecard for its integration of valuable information about pollutants with tools for networking.
The site, which is funded by EDF membership fees and grants from the Joyce Foundation and the Clarence E. Heller Foundation, is run off a "little SPARC pizza box," admits Greenspun. When traffic is heavy, broken links and server errors are common. Another gigabyte of server RAM will be added next week.
Eventually, Pease says, the EDF would like to generate real-time maps of toxic releases from reports filed by companies electronically. Another resource considered for the future of the site is a database that would allow consumers to determine what potentially threatening compounds are in a given product, such as hair mousse.
As it is, the EDF's press release states, the Scorecard "is a giant step toward making the facts about local pollution... as easy to get as a local weather report, and as much a part of people's everyday resources."
