Risk-Screening Environmental Indicators · updated past EPA's last release
EPA's RSEI model turns every factory's reported air releases into a score that weighs how toxic each chemical is and how many people live downwind. EPA's last release covers 2022. The 2023 and 2024 numbers here are recomputed from EPA's own modeled results and the latest Toxics Release Inventory filings. They are a relative screening score for comparing places and plants, not a health-risk estimate.
Click a row to see the facility. Scores are unitless and only meaningful relative to each other.
| # | Facility | State | Score | vs. prior year | Largest contributor | Notes |
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What RSEI is. EPA runs the Toxics Release Inventory's reported releases through an air dispersion model (AERMOD), on an 810 m grid out to 49 km around each plant, then multiplies the modeled concentration by a toxicity weight and by the people living in each grid cell. EPA published new results every year up to the 2022 reporting year (released March 2024) and has released nothing since.
How 2023 and 2024 were rebuilt. RSEI's air model is linear in the pounds released, so EPA's own result for a plant, chemical and release type (stack or fugitive) scales with the pounds reported. For 80–89% of the 2023–24 score we use exactly that: EPA's per-pound result times the new pounds, adjusted for EPA's population growth. New chemicals at a known plant borrow EPA's result for the plant's chemical with the closest air decay rate. Plants EPA never modeled borrow the footprints of their five nearest modeled neighbours, matched on stack height.
How well it works. Rebuilding 2022 from EPA's 2021 results alone, the national total lands within 0.4% of EPA's own, and 84% of individual releases fall within 1% of EPA's score. Two years ahead (the situation for 2024) national totals land within 0.3–2.8%. The full validation, including county and tract checks, is in the dataset.
What it does not cover. Only on-site air releases (stack and fugitive). Water releases and off-site transfers are not included. Chemicals added to TRI after 2022 (mostly PFAS) have no RSEI toxicity weight and are not scored. Toxicity weights stay at EPA's 2022 version.
Reported, not corrected. Pounds are what facilities reported to TRI. Some 2023–24 jumps look like reporting errors (for example a plant going from 2.5 to 94,323 lb of chromium). We keep reported values and flag them rather than guessing; the badges explain each flag.
Data and code. Facility, chemical, grid-cell, tract and county files, plus EPA's 2013–2022 facility scores for comparison: Hugging Face · GitHub. Not affiliated with EPA.
Sources: EPA RSEI version 2.3.12 (1988–2022 TRI data), EPA Toxics Release Inventory basic data files 2023 and 2024, EPA RSEI census crosswalks (2020 tracts). County boundaries: US Census Bureau 2020 cartographic boundaries.