EPA recently held a meeting with interested stakeholders to explain its intention to release 2002 Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) data much earlier than in recent years. Under EPA's current plans the 2002 TRI would be available on the agency's website in February or March, several months ahead of the recent release times of May or June.

However, EPA has given preliminary indication it will not provide the underlying data to the public. Thus, it would not be available to other databases that usually house TRI – EPA’s TRI Explorer, Environmental Defense’s Scorecard, and OMB Watch’s RTK NET. Moreover, EPA’s early release will only have limited search ability and cannot be downloaded. The system they are proposing will make it very difficult to aggregate data to describe local, state, or national conditions. The early release will allow users to search copies of the Form R through EPA’s Envirofacts data warehouse. However, the accompanying analysis, which is often the most useful part, would not be available until the full release, probably in June.

Currently, a facility must submit Form R by July 1 for the previous calendar year. EPA then proceeds through a number of data quality mechanisms and analyses of the data, taking nearly a year to release the data without compromising data quality. OMB Watch along with other public interest groups has pushed for an earlier release date. While EPA’s new effort to release the Form R early is a step in the right direction, it is unclear whether the long-term plan is to move the full data release up.