Toxic releases
EPA's Toxics Release Inventory in Python: facilities and their releases on maps, air releases and carcinogens by county, the change since 2014, and the units, Form A rows and county names in the data.
Every year US industrial facilities above a size threshold tell the Environmental Protection Agency how much of each listed toxic chemical they released to air, water and land or sent away for disposal. The Toxics Release Inventory publishes it with each facility's location: for 2024, 3.29 billion lb from 21,482 facilities. It is the main public record of where industrial chemicals go, and a large part of the total is mine waste at a few sites.
The guides here read the files, map facilities by amount, map air releases per resident and carcinogen releases, compare 2014 with 2024 facility by facility, and measure how few facilities make up most of the total. Three pages deal with the traps: dioxins reported in grams, Form A rows that report no quantities, and county names that do not join to boundaries.
🧭 Start with the concepts
The ideas the how-to guides below assume you already have.
⚙️ Then do the task
Step-by-step walkthroughs with code you can copy and adapt.
- How to Read EPA Toxics Release Inventory Data in Python
- How to Map Toxic Release Facilities by Amount Released
- How to Map Toxic Air Releases per Resident by County
- How to Compare Toxic Releases Between Two Years Facility by Facility
- How to Find Where Carcinogen Releases Concentrate
- How to Find the Few Facilities Behind Most Toxic Releases
🔧 When it breaks
The errors this topic produces, with the cause explained rather than just the command.
Related topics
Subjects that keep coming up alongside this one, most overlap first.