A particularly significant success story for disclosure requirements is the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act, a law enacted by Congress in 1986 in the aftermath of an industrial chemical accident from a U.S. plant in Bhopal, India.19 Understood as a modest and uncontroversial step, it was essentially a bookkeeping measure, intended to give the EPA and local communities a sense of what hazardous materials might be lurking undetected. The statute ended up doing a lot more. In fact, the requirement of disclosure, captured in the Toxics Release Inventory, counts among the most
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