Bucking a national trend downward, Maryland businesses, factories and power plants released more toxic pollutants into the environment in 2007 than they did the year before, new data show.

According to the Toxics Release Inventory maintained by the Environmental Protection Agency, all disposals and releases of hazardous pollutants in 2007 were about five percent lower than they were in 2006, the agency announced Thursday.  Releases to air declined 7 percent, while water discharges went down 5 percent.

Maryland, however, saw a 27 percent increase in its total releases of toxic substances, from 39.9 million pounds in 2006 to 50.5 million pounds in 2007.   Total air emissions grew by 28 percent, while discharges to water grew by 5 percent in that time.

Dawn Stoltzfus, spokeswoman for the Maryland Department of the Environment, said the state's increase in toxic releases in 2007 came almost completely from Constellation Energy's Brandon Shores and H.A. Wagner power plants in Pasadena.  The plants, pictured above, reported releasing an additional 9.5 million pounds of hydrochloric acid in 2007, she said, which the company attributed to burning coal that year with a higher chloride content.

That acidic release should be reduced by next year, Stoltzfus said, when Constellation finishes building new air pollution "scrubbers" for its Brandon Shores burners.

For whatever reason, the rise in toxic chemical releases this year breaks a downward trend of at least three years for the state.  Nationally, there also are some upticks in toxic pollution amid the overall downward trend - increase reported in "persistent, bioaccumulative and toxic" chemicals like lead, dioxin, mercury and PCBs.

You can read EPA's release on the nationwide toxic release trends here.  If you want to dig into Maryland's situation, the 2007 fact sheet is here, and the 2006 summary here.

(2006 photo by Kim Hairston of the Baltimore Sun)