Assessing residential socioeconomic factors associated with pollutant releases using EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory

There is a large body of literature showing that minorities and people living in low-income households live disproportionately close to polluting industrial facilities across the United States. However, only limited work of this nature has been conducted in Upstate New York. In this study, we utilized hierarchical clustering to create seven residential clusters from four Upstate New York counties; each cluster was then spatially linked to the locations of the polluting facilities and the quantity of pollutants released. The largest numbers of facilities and the highest quantities of releases were located in two clusters described as primarily working class. The lowest numbers of facilities were located in the two clusters representing neighborhoods that were the most economically deprived and the most wealthy and educated. These findings suggest that, in addition to race and class as predictors of community-level contamination, other metrics of socioeconomic status might help clarify the complex landscape of environmental inequity.