Some material measures are indicators of the amount of stress being placed on the ecosystem
while others measure the actual impact of the organization on an ecosystem. Impacts are the result of
ecosystem responses to stressors and thus inherently more complicated. In addition, recognizing that
social institutions work to transform resources across ecosystems/space and time distorting our
understanding of environmental impacts, choosing a specific indicator of environmental impact may
indicate improvement when environmental impacts have either been transformed in nature (i.e., a
shift from using coal to nuclear) or across space and time. Take, for example, the toxic release inventory
(TRI), one of the most accessible databases. Grant, Bergesen, and Jones (2002) and Grant and
Jones (2003) use TRIs and find that large chemical plants emit toxins at a higher rate than small
plants, and this difference increases if the large plant is part of a larger corporation. Freudenberg
(2005) and Freudenburg and Nowak (2000) use these same data to support the claim that there is a
“disproportionality” between economic and environmental impacts at the level of economic sectors,
industries, and specific facilities. These works are highly respectable in their efforts to integrate both
social and material variables. However, measures of toxic releases only consider pollution at the
point of production and not the toxins in the end products. Furthermore, TRI only tracks certain
chemicals that have been tested and determined to be toxic, while there is a large number of chemical
by-products of production that have not been tested at all.