Billing Code - PHMSA - Department of Transportation

divided the $177 million by an estimate of the total value of hazardous materials produced
in the United States in 2010. The total value of hazardous materials produced in the
United States was estimated to be $151 billion. To derive this $151 billion estimate, we
summed relevant product values reported in the Census Bureau’s Annual Survey of
Manufactures: Value of Product Shipments, and then multiplied the result by 12.4
percent—the percentage of shipment values reported to be hazardous products (this
parameter was obtained from Table 10 in the Census Bureau’s 2007 Commodity Flow
Survey for Hazardous Materials). The resulting hazard communication cost per dollar of
hazardous materials output was estimated to be $0.001 (or $177 million ÷ $151 billion).
We were not able to identify any comprehensive source on hazardous materials
imports and exports and therefore developed estimates for these figures using quarterly
trade data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis 3 and data on the transportation of
hazardous materials from the Census Bureau’s 2007 Commodity Flow Survey. The
quarterly trade data on the value of imports and exports—for fuels and lubricants,
chemicals, and medicinal/dental/pharmaceutical products—were summed to produce a
single annual trade value for 2010 for industries that produce hazardous materials. Before
aggregating the import and export values, we reduced the import values by half to take into
account the assumption mentioned previously that foreign producers would be able to pass
on only half of the additional hazard communication costs to U.S. consumers. Total
annual trade for industries that produce hazardous materials was computed to be just over
$498 billion in 2010.
3 http://www.bea.gov/international/detailed_trade_data.htm
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