The article I chose to use for this exercise can be found on Environmental Health Perspectives, it is titled “GIS Modeling of Air Toxics Releases from TRI- Reporting and Non-TRI-Reporting Facilities: Impacts for Environmental Justice”. This article was written by Dana C. Dolinoy and Marie Lynn Miranda.

I chose this article because I was looking for methods on how to use geographical information systems to measure environmental justice. As I read through the article I came to realize that there wasn’t a clear way of how the project used demographics and environmental justice (air quality) data to map a correlation between the two. I decided to continue using the article because it contained helpful information about the Census Bureau and how data like air quality is estimated in order to create a map.

To begin, the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) require facilities to report the chemical releases of the year annually, but there is an issue when monitoring the total number of released toxics when non- TRI reporting facilities don’t report. This relates to my project because there might be pesticide use that goes unreported; how can I measure this to create and accurate map? Having the tools needed to measure the exact levels of toxicity lets the research team find correlations. For example, in 1990, 80% of Hispanics lived in counties that exceeded on of the criteria of air pollutant standards the federal government set. This project used demographic data from the U.S. Census Bureau to collect data on ethnicity, poverty, household income, and percentage of children in poverty in Durham County, North Carolina. When I came up with my research question I was confused as to how I should map out certain demographics, it turns out the census Bureau information can be broken into different geographic scales: ZIP code, tracts, block groups, and blocks. Furthermore, TRI data must be collected and reported to the Environmental Protection Agency; the project had TRI facility locations geocoded (latitude and longitude coordinates) and mapped. There are 874 TRI sites releasing more than 126 million pounds of contaminates in the air in Durham County. Non- TRI reports were extracted from marketing directories; there are 400 non- TRI reporting facilities.

Dolinoy, D. C., & Miranda, M. L. (2004). GIS modeling of air toxics releases from TRI-reporting and non-TRI-reporting facilities: impacts for environmental justice. Environmental health perspectives, 112(17), 1717.