Toxic 100 Air and Water rankings released

The Political Economy Research Institute at Umass (PERI) has released the Toxic 100 Air and Water rankings of top corporate polluters for 2016, based on Toxic Release Inventory data as weighted by EPA's geographic micro data RSEI model and with facilities assigned to a regularized set of parent companies.

One of the things that becomes apparent in analyses of these kind of data -- whether it's a news story like this one on the super polluters that USA Today did with the Center for Public Integrity or an academic paper published by Mary Collins, Joseph JaJa, and Ian Muñoz -- is that pollution from fixed facilities is dominated by a small number of facilities. To reduce pollution overall you don't necessarily have to reduce it from every facility equally.

Here's an example from the Toxic 100 Air. DuPont, the company ranked second on the list, has 97% of its total U.S. score from a single facility, the DuPont Pontchartrain Works in La Place, LA -- emissions that affect a local population that is over 60% racial and ethnic minorities. So what's going on there?