PlainEnviro

Environmental Rankings

States ranked by reported pollution, hazardous-waste, and drinking-water indicators. These single-metric tables use EPA Toxics Release Inventory, Superfund, and PlainEnviro's health-based Safe Drinking Water Information System extract; they do not rank overall environmental quality or water safety.

Most TRI Facilities

States with the most Toxics Release Inventory reporting facilities, industrial pollution hotspots.

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  1. 1 Texas 2,342
  2. 2 Ohio 1,546
  3. 3 California 1,426
  4. 4 Pennsylvania 1,261
  5. 5 Illinois 1,145

Most Toxic Chemical Releases

States with the highest total pounds of toxic chemicals released into the environment.

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  1. 1 Alaska 3,853,415,400.283
  2. 2 Nevada 1,843,871,873.899
  3. 3 Texas 1,088,433,980.257
  4. 4 Utah 1,058,882,042.024
  5. 5 Louisiana 690,093,847.109

Superfund Sites by State

States ranked by EPA National Priorities List hazardous waste site counts.

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  1. 1 New Jersey 153
  2. 2 Pennsylvania 127
  3. 3 New York 122
  4. 4 California 116
  5. 5 Michigan 90

Water Violations by State

States ranked by raw health-based SDWIS violation-record counts, not a water-quality score.

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  1. 1 Texas 35,693
  2. 2 Oklahoma 29,177
  3. 3 California 17,705
  4. 4 Louisiana 14,536
  5. 5 New Mexico 8,034

Fewest Health-Based Water Violation Records

States with the lowest raw count in PlainEnviro's EPA health-based violation extract; not a water-safety ranking.

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  1. 1 Guam 12
  2. 2 Hawaii 31
  3. 3 District of Columbia 38
  4. 4 U.S. Virgin Islands 108
  5. 5 Delaware 160

Most Water Systems

States with the largest number of public water systems serving their populations.

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  1. 1 Texas 4,620
  2. 2 California 3,068
  3. 3 Washington 2,410
  4. 4 New York 2,242
  5. 5 North Carolina 1,958

Every figure on PlainEnviro is rendered directly from EPA environmental compliance data, no number is typed in by an editor. Rankings are computed directly from EPA data. See our editorial standards & corrections policy, the methodology behind these numbers, or report a data error.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, these rankings are computed from PlainEnviro's database of more than 25,000 TRI-reporting facilities, 49,190 public water systems and 1,839 Superfund National Priorities List sites; toxic-release totals cover the 2023 TRI reporting year, while the health-based drinking-water extract runs through 2025. Every position is a direct ordering of reported federal figures, not an assessment of environmental quality or health risk; see our methodology for full source citations and refresh cadence.