About wimby
The federal government publishes a great deal about which facilities near you handle hazardous waste, discharge into waterways, or emit regulated pollutants. Almost none of it is browsable by someone who just wants to know what is near their house. This site is an attempt to fix that.
What it does
Type an address and you get the regulated facilities within a given radius, ranked by distance, with whatever the EPA knows about each one: which programs it is enrolled in, whether it is currently in violation, how often it has been inspected, and what penalties it has paid. You can filter by category, and for hazardous waste, air, and water you can narrow to specific permit classes.
What it isn't
It is not a risk assessment, and it is not a measure of what you are being exposed to. Regulatory enrollment is a poor proxy for harm: a facility can be enrolled in several programs and be scrupulously compliant, and a facility can be absent from these datasets entirely and still be a problem. Proximity to a mapped point tells you very little on its own.
Most facilities appear here because they hold a permit or file reports - that is what these registries track, and the great majority of them are compliant. A listing is not a claim that a facility has polluted anything. Where a compliance status or a penalty total is shown, it is the EPA's own determination as published in the data file on the date given in the facility popup, not a judgment made by this site.
The Data page goes through the specific ways these datasets mislead (approximate coordinates, five-year enforcement windows, inspection gaps) and is worth reading before drawing conclusions from anything here.
If a facility near you looks alarming, the right next step is its EPA facility report, linked from the facility's popup. That page has the underlying inspection and enforcement history rather than the summary shown here.
How it works
A Python pipeline downloads the published bulk files from each source, loads them into PostGIS, and normalizes them into a common facility schema. The map is MapLibre GL JS over a CARTO basemap, and the API is FastAPI doing spatial queries against PostGIS. Address lookup uses the US Census Bureau geocoder.
One known rough edge: the same physical site often appears in several source datasets, and proper entity resolution is not finished. Records sharing an EPA registry ID are currently merged, which handles the common case but not every one.
Privacy
There are no accounts and no analytics or advertising trackers, and the site sets no cookies of its own. The server does not keep a log of requests, so the addresses you search and the parts of the map you look at are not recorded here.
A few outside services are involved in showing you the map, and each sees your IP address under its own terms:
- Cloudflare serves the site, handles HTTPS and filters abusive traffic, so it sees every request to this site.
- The US Census Bureau receives the addresses you type into the search box, and turns them into coordinates.
- CARTO supplies the background map, so it sees which areas you view.
- unpkg supplies the map software that runs in your browser.
When you open the map, your browser asks whether to share your location. If you allow it, the map opens on your general area, rounded to about a kilometer, and your exact position stays in your browser. If you decline, the map opens on Allentown, Pennsylvania. The "use my location" button goes further: it searches around your position rounded to about 100 meters, which is sent to this site's server to run the search. That rounded position also appears in the page's link, so keep that in mind before sharing it.
Corrections and contact
Errors in facility locations and details almost always originate upstream, so corrections are best filed with the EPA directly, and will then flow here on the next data refresh. For problems with the site itself, or for a source you think is worth adding, get in touch.
If you are connected to a facility that appears at the wrong address, or under a category it does not belong in, please report it here as well as upstream. A wrong coordinate puts a pin on somebody else's property, and that is the kind of mistake this site can correct at its own end rather than waiting on a data refresh.