What They Released

Short answer: yes, but not the way the headline number claims. Within a fixed set of chemicals, releases fell about 38% across the 1990s. Then in 1998 the EPA folded metal mining and electric utilities into the program, and the reported total more than quadrupled overnight - not because more was dumped, but because more was counted. The line below is really two lines. Read each era on its own.

Here is the map the title promises: every state shaded by the total pounds released inside it in a single year. It is a raw count, not a rate, so the darkest states are simply the ones moving the most weight - and the map is blunt about why. A handful of Western mining states run away with it, because crushing and processing ore displaces enormous tonnages of metal-bearing rock that count as releases. The next section pulls those two ideas apart; the table below adds a per-person column so no small state hides behind Texas.

The map answers “where are the pounds?” It does not answer “where is it worst to live?” Those come apart. Plot each state by its total pounds (across) against its pounds per resident (up), both on log scales, and the states split into two families: a thin, sparsely-peopled mining West that runs high on both axes, and a heavily-industrial bottom-right - Texas, California - with giant totals but unremarkable per-person loads.

• Metal-mining-led state
• Manufacturing & other

Zoom from the state to the county and the concentration gets starker still. One Alaskan borough - home to a single zinc mine - out-releases most entire states. Each bar is one county; the list underneath names its biggest single reporting facility, the plant doing most of the moving.

1. 01 Northwest Arctic Borough County, AK · Teck Alaska - Red Dog Operations 578M lbs · 1 facility · Zinc compounds
2. 02 Salt Lake County, UT · Kennecott Utah Copper - Bingham Canyon 176M lbs · 34 facilities · Copper compounds
3. 03 Humboldt County, NV · Nevada Gold Mines - Turquoise Ridge 118M lbs · 9 facilities · Arsenic compounds
4. 04 Elko County, NV · Nevada Gold Mines - Carlin 104M lbs · 12 facilities · Arsenic compounds
5. 05 Gila County, AZ · Freeport-McMoRan - Miami 86M lbs · 6 facilities · Copper
6. 06 Greenlee County, AZ · Freeport-McMoRan - Morenci 79M lbs · 3 facilities · Copper
7. 07 Lake County, IN · U.S. Steel - Gary Works 71M lbs · 58 facilities · Manganese compounds
8. 08 Tooele County, UT · US Magnesium LLC 54M lbs · 11 facilities · Chlorine
9. 09 Iron County, MO · Doe Run - Buick Mine / Mill 44M lbs · 4 facilities · Lead compounds
10. 10 Jefferson County, TX · ExxonMobil - Beaumont Refinery 41M lbs · 62 facilities · Zinc compounds
11. 11 Brazoria County, TX · Dow Chemical - Freeport 37M lbs · 71 facilities · Nitrate compounds
12. 12 East Baton Rouge County, LA · ExxonMobil - Baton Rouge 35M lbs · 44 facilities · Ammonia

Illustrative rollup in the real derived.json shape. Counties ranked by total release pounds (on + off site) summed across every reporting facility. Swap-point: the COUNTY + ST group-by in build-data.ts. The named plants are the real top emitters historically associated with these counties.

One sector towers over the rest. Metal mining alone accounts for close to half the national poundage - and almost none of it leaves the site. Where each industry’s pounds end up is the tell: mining keeps roughly 98% on its own land, while electric utilities put more than half of theirs into the air. The deep bar is what stays on-site; the pale tail is what is shipped elsewhere for disposal.

• On-site release
• Off-site / shipped for disposal

Illustrative rollup in the real shape. Bars sum on-site (field 65) and off-site (field 88) release pounds per INDUSTRY SECTOR (field 23); “to air” is the fugitive + stack fraction (fields 5.1, 5.2). Swap-point: the sector group-by in build-data.ts.

The national plateau hides ten different stories moving underneath it. Coal retirements have pulled electric utilities down for a decade; mining lurches with commodity prices; food processing has crept the wrong way. Each panel is one sector’s last nine years, scaled to its own range so the shape shows - a rising line is drawn in rust.

Illustrative trajectories in the real shape. Each panel is a sector’s release pounds for 2016-2024, on an independent y-scale (shape, not magnitude - magnitude is the ranked bars in Section 5). In the committed illustrative file these trends are hand-authored; the swap-point (build-data.ts) approximates them by weighting the national year-over-year total by each sector’s current share until per-year sector files are ingested.

“Released” is not one thing. The same pound can go up a smokestack, down a pipe, into a deep injection well, or onto the ground and stay there. The mix is the reassurance and the catch at once: the mining tonnage that makes the map so dark is overwhelmingly land disposal kept on the mine site - while the chemicals people actually breathe are the roughly 22% that goes to the air.

1. Land disposal, on-site 57% 1.89B lbs
2. Air (stack + fugitive) 22% 728M lbs
3. Off-site / shipped for disposal 10% 331M lbs
4. Underground injection 7% 232M lbs
5. Surface water discharge 4% 132M lbs

Illustrative shares in the real shape. Pathways map to Form R fields: land disposal (5.5.x), stack air (5.2), off-site transfers to disposal (field 88), underground injection (5.4), fugitive air (5.1), surface water (5.3). The bar merges stack and fugitive into one air band; the table keeps them split.

Weight is not danger. The heaviest releases here are mostly metal compounds from mining, inert enough that a ton of them troubles a toxicologist less than a few pounds of something sharper. Yet several of the heavy hitters also carry a carcinogen flag, or the PBT flag for toxics that climb the food chain and stay - and one entry near the bottom weighs almost nothing and matters most. The flags, not the pounds, do the real work in this table.

Counterpoint, same list, far smaller number: Perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) (90K lbs) carries the PFASPBT flags - a class of “forever chemicals” the EPA only began requiring on TRI reports in 2020. Small pounds, outsized concern.

Illustrative figures in the real shape. Flags come straight from Form R fields: CARCINOGEN (46), PBT (47), PFAS (48). CAS# / category codes (field 40) are real. Dioxin is reported in grams, not pounds, and is excluded from these weights.