• There is increasing demand in the private sector for facility-based environmental information for supply-chain management.

• Cross-media, aggregated environmental information will support better environmental decision making.

• The technology exists to deliver aggregated, spatially connected environmental information.

Public environmental protection agency administrators and industrial environmental managers, however, face fundamental questions about the availability of and, indeed, whether the collection of various types of environmental information will contribute to better environmental decisions in the agency or business. The public administrator’s concern about accessibility and perceived value may revolve around whether greater public access to aggregated environmental information will lead to improved public policy, whereas the industrial manager may question whether access to aggregated environmental information will increase the ability to control risk from a supply chain, gather life-cycle environmental information for design purposes, or allow unwanted access to competitive engineering processes.

This paper discusses the value of aggregated environmental information to Environmental Protection Agency administrators and industrial environmental managers. It also presents the challenges in providing public access to this type of information, using the case study of an environmental information system called Fact, which is being implemented by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (WDNR).¹

Environmental regulatory agencies are mandated to protect the environment. As part of this mandate, federal and state environmental protection agencies collect large amounts of permit discharge and ambient monitoring data to assess regional and local environmental conditions, to determine compliance, and to charge fees. Industrial entities similarly collect vast amounts of environmental information related to their operations. Companies that implement environmental management systems under the International Organization for Standardization 14001, and adopt the goals of organizations such as the Coalition of Environmentally Responsible Economies or the Global Environmental Management Initiative, collect and publicly disclose much more information than is required by regulation. Each entity— industrial or governmental—collects environmental information to meet specific needs. The information, therefore, is available, but this information alone may not be what is needed to answer a specific environmental question or issue.