PlainEnviro is a data-journalism publisher. We take the environmental records the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency publishes and turn them into pages that an ordinary reader can understand, without losing the precision a researcher or journalist needs. This page sets out the standards we hold ourselves to and how to tell us when we get something wrong.

How our content is produced

Every page on the site is built from public EPA data, not from opinion or outside interpretation. Our process has four stages: we acquire the raw data from official EPA systems; we parse and normalise it into a consistent structure; we compute the rankings, aggregates, and trends you see; and we review the result against the source before it goes live. Where a page carries written analysis — our research studies and guides — a named editor reviews it. Where a page is a direct rendering of a dataset, the underlying agency source and the data vintage are cited on the page itself. We describe the full pipeline, including refresh cadence and known lag, on our methodology page.

Sourcing standards

We use only authoritative, public, U.S. government data: the EPA Toxics Release Inventory, the Safe Drinking Water Information System, the Superfund National Priorities List, and the Enforcement and Compliance History Online (ECHO) system. We do not use estimates, projections, scraped third-party content, or AI-generated facts. Every data page links back to the EPA source it draws on so you can verify any figure for yourself. When the data is self-reported — as TRI release quantities are — we say so plainly rather than presenting an estimate as a measurement.

Accuracy and context

We try hard to present numbers truthfully and in context. A large reported release is a large reported figure — it is not, on its own, evidence of harm to anyone nearby, because real-world risk depends on the specific chemical, how it is released, distance, and exposure. We avoid superlatives we cannot defend, we label the year and dataset edition a figure comes from, and we flag the limits of the data on the pages where it matters. We do not editorialise about who is good or bad; we present the federal record and explain how to read it.

Editorial independence

Our only revenue source is contextual display advertising served by Google AdSense. Advertisers have no say in which facilities, companies, or places we cover, or in how we present the data, and they receive no preferential placement. We do not accept payment, sponsorship, or promoted placement from government agencies, environmental organisations, or any entity covered by the data. PlainEnviro is an independent project and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the EPA or any government body.

Corrections

We correct errors as soon as we can confirm them. If you spot a figure that looks wrong, a mislabelled source, a broken link, or anything else that does not match the official record, email us at hello@plainenviro.com and tell us the page and what looks off. Many of the numbers on the site are rendered live from our database, so a correction at the data source flows through to every page that uses it; for written analysis, we update the page and, where a correction is material, note that it was changed. We would rather hear about a mistake and fix it than leave it standing.