T-Watch Toxic Watch Network, Japan

May 22,2005
Shigeharu Nakachi 
The Chairperson of the Board of  Directors,
Toxic Watch Network

 The announcement of our new “T-Watch” web site in English
and a request for news coverage 

Dear Reporters 

Management of chemical substances has been put almost exclusively into hands of the Government, business, and scientists for a long time. Huge amount of chemicals has been produced and used for several decades and the amount is still increasing with newly created substances day by day. Now, we believe that it’s time for citizens to actively take part in managing the risk of chemicals in order to minimized environmental risks around us and around the Planet.

In July, 1999, PRTR Act  was enacted in Japan. With the implementation of PRTR Act was launched in 2001 and the first data was officially announced in March 2003. Making full use of the PRTR data, we believe, enable us to reduce the amount of toxic chemical release from manufacturers as well as from households. However, the officially announced aggregate data at present is not easy for lay citizens to evaluate as meaningful data without expertise. Also they are not enough to meet the citizens’ diverse expectation ranging from the health impact to the impact on eco-systems.

We established a non-profit organization, The Network for Diminution of Toxic Chemicals (Toxic Watch Network) in April 2002, providing an internet web site so that citizens can search registered pollutant release data of factories and sites. Approximately eighty thousand concerned citizens, who sought to minimize environmental risks from chemicals, accessed to our web site since then.

In the US, Canada, and the UK, where PRTR has been in practice for more than a decade, environmental NGOs have provided similar PRTR information web sites like ours for citizens. Our web site has been unfortunately only in Japanese. We thought our English web site would be necessary and convenient for our counterparts all over the world to make a comparison of emission data between Japan and others and we have almost finished it.

We will open English T-watch web site, http://www.toxwatch.net/en/ on June 1, 2005. We hope you take a close look at it. We also appreciate it very much if you kindly introduce our web site through your news media. Our test web site, http://toxwatch.dyndns.org/Make_PRTR2004/search.aspx is also available even before June 1, 2005.

For further information, contact nakachi@toxwatch.net. Thank you in advance.

Sincerely yours,

Shigeharu Nakachi