What are superfunds?

Superfunds are areas in the US that are contaminated by hazardous waste. Thanks to a Congressional act from 1980, the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) manages the cleanup of these sites and holds relevant parties accountable.

There are currently 1257 active Superfund sites across the US.

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Briefly describe your relationship to polluted environments and why you are passionate about the Superfund’s purpose.

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Census and Superfund Data

Source 1, Source 2

The previous map and following data references the EPA's Superfund data and the 2019 United States Census. The 2019 Census lists 3142 counties. Of these, the average population percentage of Black residents is approximately 13.4%. Thus, the census and superfund data was merged and analyzed for sites in counties with over 13.4% Black residents. About 7% of all counties fit into this category of having both Superfund sites and an above average Black population percentage.

28.7%

of all counties with a higher than average Black population have at least one Superfund site.

23.7%

of counties have a Black population percentage above the national average. However, they contain 34.7% of all Superfunds in the EPA's database.

79%

of counties in the US with a higher than average Black population are female-dominated.

92%

of counties in the US with a higher than average Black population and with a Superfund site are female-dominated. Thus, the presence of Superfund sites appears to disproportionately affect black women.

Impact

We envision the impact of our project being to help the environmental racism that current exists in the United States. If we are able to show that current legislature is racist and sexist, and in turn raise awareness with our representatives about that, then we can bring more immediate attention to these pressing issues.

Future Potential

One direction we see this project going is Natural Language Processing of twitter sentiment analysis. By overlaying these analyses onto our existing maps, we could tell a more complete story of the lives of those affected by institutional environmental harm. Most importantly, this resource we created should be made into a directly utilizable resource for community organizers. It allows them to quickly and meaningfully display the interactive data, give their activists a means to reach out to relevant officials, and share the issue with a wide range of audiences.