Waste Database

The search­able data­base below allows users to deter­mine which facil­i­ties their munic­i­pal sol­id waste (MSW) ends up in. Know­ing this cru­cial infor­ma­tion empow­ers res­i­dents to be informed about the impact of the trash they generate.

For exam­ple, if you deter­mine that your trash is going to an incin­er­a­tor (many times an exam­ple of envi­ron­men­tal racism), you could approach your local sol­id waste man­age­ment board and request that they divert your waste to a land­fill. If you would like a more com­pre­hen­sive analy­sis of your com­mu­ni­ties waste flow pat­terns, please con­tact Leel Dias.

Data Lim­i­ta­tions

This data­base is in beta. 45% of state data has been com­bined into the data­base above — the rest will be added soon. There­fore, be cau­tious when using the data above to draw con­clu­sions or inform pol­i­cy. Feel free to reach out if you have any ques­tions, com­ments, or need clar­i­fi­ca­tion about the data.

The data­base cur­rent­ly includes data from:

• Ari­zona
• Col­orado
• Con­necti­cut
• Delaware
• Flori­da
• Geor­gia
• Neva­da
• Nebras­ka
• Mass­a­chu­setts
• North Car­oli­na
• New Jer­sey
• Pennsly­va­nia
• Utah
• Vir­ginia
• Ver­mont
• Hawaii

It is antic­i­pat­ed that all states will be added by the ear­ly 2023.

Having trouble using the database above? Check out this tutorial video.

Since there is no nation­al sol­id waste data inven­to­ry (such as RCRAIn­fo which tracks haz­ardous waste), the strength of data varies wild­ly from state to state. Some states (such as Alas­ka) don’t track sol­id waste at all while oth­er states (such as Con­necti­cut or New Jer­sey) track the ori­gin of waste down to munic­i­pal­i­ties. There­fore, even when this data­base is ful­ly com­plet­ed (fea­tur­ing data from all states) it will not ful­ly rep­re­sent the nation­al pic­ture (as some states don’t track data). Addi­tion­al­ly, some states track import and export data while oth­ers don’t. Also, note that old­er data is gen­er­al­ly less com­pre­hen­sive and less reliable.

For an overview of the scope and thor­ough­ness of data for each state in the data­base see this table.

Final­ly, data from some states are more accu­rate and more thor­ough­ly vet­ted than oth­ers. The Ener­gy Jus­tice Net­work assumes no respon­si­bil­i­ty for the accu­ra­cy of the data — we sim­ply com­piled the data pro­vid­ed to us by state agencies.

Data Sources

We reached out to all fifty states (and DC) request­ing “any spread­sheet or data­base track­ing the ton­nage of waste brought to each sol­id waste trans­fer, recy­cling, com­post­ing, pro­cess­ing, or dis­pos­al facil­i­ty (includ­ing land­fills and incin­er­a­tors), with fields suf­fi­cient to show the month­ly ton­nage (or quar­ter­ly or annu­al if month­ly is not avail­able), waste type, ori­gin (state, coun­ty or munic­i­pal­i­ty, in as much detail as is avail­able), and waste des­ti­na­tion if waste was trans­ferred to anoth­er loca­tion, from the ear­li­est data avail­able in a spread­sheet or data­base for­mat through the most recent data available.”

Using pub­lic record requests, we obtained the most up-to-date sol­id waste data. Data was in many dif­fer­ent for­mats — from online web por­tals (check out the Python script we wrote to extract and parse Geor­gia’s sol­id waste data) to excel spread­sheets to Microsoft Access data­bas­es. We doc­u­ment­ed the strength of the data and not­ed any lim­i­ta­tions or issues with the data. 

We then com­bined the data into an SQLite3 data­base (using Microsoft Access as a fron­tend). Final­ly, we uti­lized Tableau Pub­lic to trans­form the data into an eas­i­ly use­able web data­base. If you would like a copy of the SQLite3 data­base or data for a spe­cif­ic state, please email us.