PlainEnviro

Top 10 US States by EPA Reported Toxic Releases

EPA Toxics Release Inventory data ranking all 50 US states by the number of reporting industrial facilities and overall facility footprint. Every figure is drawn directly from the EPA dataset and refreshes whenever the EPA publishes an update.

Research period:

Compiled by PlainEnviro Editorial on 2026-05-16

Research question

Across 50 US states in the EPA Toxics Release Inventory and SDWIS datasets, which host the largest count of reporting industrial facilities, water systems, and Superfund sites, and how concentrated is the distribution?

Methodology

This ranking is built directly from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s published environmental data, ranking the 50 states by the number of EPA Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) reporting facilities each one contains. Every figure shown is taken straight from the EPA’s release, nothing is hand-entered, estimated, or adjusted beyond display formatting, and each number is auditable back to its source record through the state links in the table.

States with no reported value on the ranking metric are left out rather than shown as zero, so the list reflects only the states the EPA actually reports activity for. The EPA occasionally suppresses individual values for confidentiality or data-quality reasons; those records are excluded here by design rather than displayed as zeros. Counts appear exactly as the EPA publishes them, with thousands separators added only for readability.

The figures reflect the most recent EPA data release we have processed. When the EPA publishes a revision, the updated values flow through to this page automatically, so there are no hand-copied numbers to fall out of date. Alongside the top ten, we show whole-population context, the total number of states reported and the average facility count, so you can see how concentrated the top of the distribution really is.

See the methodology page for the full source list, data vintages, and how each metric is defined.

Top 10 US States by EPA Reported Toxic Releases

States ranked by EPA-reported TRI facility count

facilities

What this shows Facility count tracks each state's industrial footprint; it does not normalize for population, land area, or per-facility release volume.

Source U.S. Environmental Protection Agency As of 2023

The ranked top 10

All 10 ranked states, drawn directly from the EPA dataset.

# State Abbr TRI facilities Water systems Superfund sites
1 Texas TX 2,342 4,587 70
2 Ohio OH 1,546 1,094 50
3 California CA 1,426 3,077 116
4 Pennsylvania PA 1,241 1,787 127
5 Illinois IL 1,145 1,783 56
6 Indiana IN 1,028 718 53
7 Wisconsin WI 991 977 46
8 North Carolina NC 924 1,965 42
9 Michigan MI 918 1,433 90
10 Georgia GA 867 1,715 23

Source: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, EPA TRI / SDWIS / Superfund consolidated state rollup. Figures are drawn directly from the EPA release and refresh when the EPA publishes an update. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, EPA TRI / SDWIS / Superfund consolidated state rollup. Figures are drawn directly from the EPA release and refresh when the EPA publishes an update.

Findings

Top entity in the ranking

The top-ranked record in this dataset is Texas, with a value of 2,342 on the TRI facilities column. The full top-10 set is shown in the table above. Every value is drawn directly from the EPA data. When the source agency publishes a revision, the ranking and the text around it update automatically.

Distribution shape

The top-ranked state, Texas, reports 2,342 TRI facilities – about 2.7× the 10th-ranked state (867). The leading states are highly concentrated: a handful host a disproportionate share of the reporting facilities. The full distribution beyond this top-10 cut is summarized in the aggregate context section below and explored in the linked entity profiles.

Aggregate context

Across all 56 reporting states, the combined facility count is 25,902, an average of 463 facilities per state. The top-10 states shown above account for 48.0% of that combined total. States with no reported value are excluded from these totals, exactly as they are from the ranking. These totals are computed across the same EPA dataset shown in the ranking.

Source provenance

The records in this ranking originate from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, specifically the EPA TRI / SDWIS / Superfund consolidated state rollup. PlainEnviro presents the EPA’s published release here unchanged except for display formatting. Because the figures are drawn directly from that release, a revised EPA dataset propagates to this page automatically, with no stale hand-copied numbers. The methodology page documents the source URL, the vintage date, and how the data is prepared.

Why this ranking matters

Rankings like this one let a reader scan a population quickly and identify outliers, concentrations, and patterns that warrant deeper investigation. The detail pages linked from each entity in the table above give the full per-entity context: time-series history where available, related metrics from adjacent tables, and links onward to the underlying source records. The methodology page explains how an entity earns inclusion in the dataset and how the ranking column is computed at the source.

What this analysis cannot tell us

TRI facility counts reflect facilities reporting to the EPA Toxics Release Inventory under thresholds defined in EPCRA section 313, facilities below the activity or chemical thresholds are not in the dataset even when emitting regulated chemicals. Reporting categories and chemical lists have changed across reporting years, so longitudinal comparison requires careful attention to TRI methodology revisions. Superfund counts reflect sites on the National Priorities List; sites in pre-NPL assessment, deleted from the NPL, or addressed under separate authorities (RCRA, brownfields) are not represented in this single count. Drinking water system counts come from the SDWIS Federal Reporting System and reflect active public water systems of varying sizes and types. Violations counts aggregate health-based and monitoring violations under SDWA, these are not equivalent in severity.

Secondary cut from the same source

Top 10 states by EPA Superfund (National Priorities List) site count

Superfund sites

What this shows Superfund site count reflects active National Priorities List placement; it excludes pre-NPL, deleted, and separately-authorized cleanup sites.

Source U.S. Environmental Protection Agency As of 2023

Related data

Sources