Community-Right-to-Know
For more than two decades, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has administered the Emergency Planning and Community-Right-to-Know Act or EPCRA. The program is intended to help communities protect residents from potential chemical hazards. Under EPCRA, you have the “right-to-know” about chemicals in your community. Each year facilities in specific industries that manufacture, process or use the nearly 650 chemicals identified under the program must report their releases to air, land and water. EPA manages the information in a publicly available database known as the Toxic Release Inventory or TRI.
We support your right-to-know and provide our annual TRI report here, in addition to EPA’s database. The chemicals that we report under the program are primarily produced as a result of using coal, oil and refuse-derived fuel (processed municipal solid waste) to produce electricity. These fuels contain trace amounts of TRI reportable substances, including barium, chromium, copper, lead, manganese, mercury, nickel and zinc. When the fuels are combusted, they release these substances. We report releases by facility. A facility’s releases may change slightly from year-to-year since they are based on the amount of electricity produced and associated fuel consumed. Releases also may vary because of minor differences in fuel composition and mineralogy depending on the mine or other fuel source.
The majority of our TRI releases are contained to land because emission controls at our facilities capture about 80 to 90 percent of these substances in or with particulate or ash emissions. These emissions are safely stored in managed landfills or are recycled for useful purposes, such as concrete products, roadbed material, flash fill and soil stabilization. Either way, there is no public contact. Ash reused for beneficial purposes is excluded from our TRI reporting because it is not classified as a release.
View Xcel Energy TRI information for your state and community: