Linking ‘toxic outliers’ to environmental justice communities

Several key studies have found that a smallminority of producers, polluting at levels far exceeding group averages, generate themajority of overall exposure to industrial toxics. Frequently, such patterns go unnoticed and are understudied outside of the academic community. To our knowledge, no research to date has systematically described the scope and extent of extreme variations in industrially based exposure estimates and sought to link inequities in harmproduced to inequities in exposure. In an analysis of all permitted industrial facilities across theUnited States, we show that there exists a class of hyper-polluters—theworst-of-the-worst—that disproportionately expose communities of color and low income populations to chemical releases. This study hopes tomove beyond a traditional environmental justice research frame, bringing new computationalmethods and perspectives aimed at the empirical study of societal power dynamics. Ourfindings suggest the possibility that substantial environmental gainsmay bemade through selective environmental enforcement, rather than sweeping initiatives.