The Environmental Defense Chemical Scorecard

1. The Environmental Defense Chemical Scorecard National Infrastructure for Community Statistics February 16, 2005 John M. Balbus MD, MPH Director, Health Program Environmental Defense

2. An introduction to Environmental Defense • Founded in 1967 by scientist, high school teacher, and lawyer • Now 270 people in eight offices around the US • Professional staff includes lawyers, economists, scientists • 45+ million dollar annual budget • “Finding the ways that work”

3. Introduction to Environmental Defense Scorecard website • Started on-line in 1998 • Provides unique context for environmental information • User-friendly • Extensive health effects information • Screening-level risk assessment allows comparisons between releases and locations

4. Scorecard’s current status • #1 ranked site for “environmental-” and “local pollution”: Google, Yahoo, etc. • 40-100,000 unique monthly visitors • Deep links to health effects data from US EPA and other websites

5. Eight “layers” Toxic Chemical Releases Lead Hazards Superfund Smog and Particulates Hazardous Air Pollutants Clean Water Act Watershed indicators Animal Waste Environmental justice analysis Health effects data 400+ databases TRI Air Quality System National Emissions Trends National Air Toxics Asst. US Census California chemical lists Risk scoring systems 100 Gb of data processed to 5-7 Gb Scorecard’s Structure

6. Data integration • Scorecard uses set of identifiers to align datasets • CAS numbers, FIPS codes, facility identifiers • Creates tables of releases aggregated by zipcodes, counties, states • Raw release data converted to toxic equivalencies, risk scores, sorted by health effect • Over 100 scripts run to generate ranking tables and graphics

7. Maintaining a rich resource…

8. Summary • Scorecard uniquely combines EPA exposure and release data with health effects data • Future of Scorecard unclear at this point