About PlainEnviro

Our Mission

We believe that every person has the right to know what is in their air, water, and soil. PlainEnviro exists because the Environmental Protection Agency publishes vast amounts of environmental data, but that data is scattered across multiple databases, buried in technical formats, and presented in ways that require specialized knowledge to interpret. We built PlainEnviro to close that gap.

Our philosophy is radical transparency without advocacy. We do not tell you what to think about the environmental conditions in your community. Instead, we present EPA data exactly as reported, organized by geography so you can explore toxic chemical releases, drinking water violations, Superfund cleanup sites, and facility compliance records for any state, county, or city in America. The data speaks for itself.

Why we built this: millions of Americans live near Superfund sites, drink water from systems with violation histories, or work alongside facilities that release toxic chemicals into the environment. These are matters of public health, and the public deserves easy access to the facts. PlainEnviro is that access point – free, searchable, and designed for everyone from concerned residents to investigative journalists to environmental researchers.

Our Data Sources

All data on PlainEnviro comes from official U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) programs. We do not use estimates, projections, or third-party interpretations. Where the data comes from, specifically:

• Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) – The EPA's annual dataset of toxic chemical releases and waste management activities. Industrial and federal facilities that meet reporting thresholds must submit Form R reports detailing quantities of listed toxic chemicals released to air, water, and land. We process multi-year TRI data (2019 through 2023) from the EPA Envirofacts Data Service API (data.epa.gov/efservice), including chemical reference data with carcinogen and persistent bioaccumulative toxicant (PBT) classifications.
• Safe Drinking Water Information System (SDWIS) – Compliance and enforcement data for public water systems regulated under the Safe Drinking Water Act. State agencies submit violation records to the EPA, categorized as health-based (Maximum Contaminant Level violations, treatment technique violations) or monitoring/reporting violations. We source this data from the EPA Envirofacts API, covering community water systems across all 50 states and territories.
• Superfund National Priorities List (NPL) – The EPA's inventory of the nation's most contaminated sites identified for long-term remedial action. Site data includes Hazard Ranking System (HRS) scores, known contaminants, NPL status, and location coordinates. We retrieve Superfund site records from the EPA ArcGIS services (services.arcgis.com).
• Enforcement and Compliance History Online (ECHO) – EPA's integrated system for tracking facility compliance status, inspection history, and enforcement actions. We process ECHO data covering 25,902 regulated facilities, showing compliance indicators, penalty amounts, and violation details over a five-year window.

How We Process the Data

Our methodology transforms raw EPA datasets into the structured, searchable profiles you see on PlainEnviro. The process involves several distinct stages:

Data acquisition: We download TRI chemical reference tables and facility release data from the EPA Envirofacts API, SDWIS water system and violation records from the same API, Superfund NPL site data from EPA ArcGIS services, and ECHO facility compliance data from EPA bulk downloads. Each source is fetched in its native format (JSON, CSV, or API pagination).

Parsing and normalization: Raw records are parsed, cleaned of encoding artifacts, and standardized into a unified schema. Facility names are normalized for consistent matching across data years. Chemical records are linked to their CAS registry numbers and classified by carcinogenicity and PBT status. Water system records are mapped to counties and states using EPA geographic area crosswalks.

Indexing and aggregation: We build state-level environmental rankings across six categories, compute pre-aggregated statistics for state and county summary pages, and create cache tables that enable sub-second page loads for any geography in the database. Facility trend data is computed year-over-year to show whether compliance is improving or declining.

Quality assurance: After processing, we validate record counts against EPA published totals, verify that all 50 states plus territories have complete coverage, and run automated checks on data integrity before any update goes live.

Data Currency

Data freshness varies by source, as each EPA program publishes on its own schedule:

• TRI data: The current dataset reflects the 2023 reporting year. The EPA releases updated TRI data annually, typically 12 to 18 months after the reporting year ends. Our database includes multi-year data from 2019 through 2023.
• SDWIS data: Water system compliance data is updated quarterly by the EPA. We refresh our database approximately every 90 days to capture new violation records and system status changes.
• Superfund data: NPL site information is updated on a rolling basis as sites progress through the remediation pipeline. We refresh this data approximately every 90 days.
• ECHO data: Facility compliance records cover a rolling five-year window (currently 2019 through 2023). We refresh this data annually.

There is always an inherent lag between when environmental events occur, when they are reported to the EPA, when the EPA publishes the data, and when PlainEnviro processes it. For the most time-sensitive decisions, always verify directly with the EPA or your state environmental agency.

Editorial Independence

Content on PlainEnviro is compiled by our editorial team. Raw data from the EPA's Toxics Release Inventory, Safe Drinking Water Information System, Superfund National Priorities List, and ECHO compliance programs is transformed into readable profiles by our continuous editorial pipeline, validated against the source before publication. The PlainEnviro editorial team, operating under PlainEnviro is responsible for editorial standards, methodology, and corrections.

We do not accept payment, sponsorship, or promoted placement from government agencies, environmental organizations, or any covered entity. Our only revenue source is contextual display advertising served by Google AdSense, advertisers do not influence which entities we cover or how we present data, and they do not receive preferential placement.

About the PlainEnviro Editorial Team

Limitations and Disclaimers

Understanding the boundaries of this data is essential to using it responsibly. Key limitations include:

• TRI reporting thresholds: Only facilities that meet specific employee count and chemical usage thresholds are required to report to the TRI. Smaller facilities and many types of businesses – including agriculture, mining, and most service industries – are exempt. The absence of TRI data for an area does not mean there are no toxic releases occurring.
• Self-reported data: TRI release quantities and facility compliance metrics are self-reported by the regulated entities. While the EPA has enforcement mechanisms for inaccurate reporting, the data fundamentally reflects what companies disclose.
• Water violation coverage: SDWIS reflects reported violations and may not capture all water quality issues. Water systems that do not report violations are not necessarily free of contaminants – they may simply not have been tested for specific substances, or violations may not yet have been formally recorded.
• Superfund site detail: Contaminant information for Superfund sites is limited to what is publicly available in EPA records. Detailed site investigation reports, ongoing remediation progress, and current contamination levels may not be fully reflected in the data we display.
• Temporal lag: Government datasets are updated periodically, not in real time. There may be a delay of weeks to months between EPA data updates and when new data appears on PlainEnviro.
• No causal conclusions: The presence of a toxic release or water violation in an area does not by itself establish health risk. Exposure depends on proximity, duration, concentration, and many other factors that this data does not capture.

Contact

We welcome questions about our data, methodology, or the information presented on PlainEnviro. If you notice an error, have a suggestion for improvement, or want to understand how a specific data point was derived, please reach out. We are also happy to hear from journalists, researchers, and community organizations who use our data in their work.

Email us at hello@plainenviro.com.