United States Hazardous Waste Sites

This visualization is based on hazardous waste sites on The United States Environmental Protection Agencie’s (EPA) superfund priority list. While that’s a touch wordy, it means that this is a list of uncontrolled hazardous waste sites that are on the EPA’s priority list to clean up. 49 of the 50 states have sites on the list. The only state that has had no sites listed on both the 2006 and the 2008 list is North Dakota, go North Dakota…or congrats on hiding your hazardous waste. New Jersey New Jersey New Jersey, what to say…good job getting those two sites knocked off the list.

[Click to enlarge.]

Source:

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Supplementary Materials: CERCLIS3/WasteLAN Database

Download sources in .xls format 2006 2008

Sites include improperly zoned landfills, municipal wells and wellfeild sites, sites with improper construction or maintenance that held hazardous chemicals, direct runoff, wind-blown dust, tracking of spilled material, and contaminated soils by vehicular traffic from hazardous waste processing sites, ect. Lookup sites near you

Hazardous materials include volatile organic compounds (VOCs), polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs),polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB), trichloroethene (TCE), ect. More information

Heath risks from these include the usual Eye, nose, and throat irritation;  headaches, loss of coordination, nausea, damage to liver, kidney, central nervous system. Some are suspected or known to cause cancer in animals and humans. More Information

I found this data set on infochimps.com, a wonderful resource for data sets.

A special thanks to Erwin Erkfitz for some design help. Check out his work here.

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