EPA Toxic Release Inventory
Type any U.S. address to see industrial chemical plants reporting to EPA's Toxic Release Inventory within 25 miles. 23,331 TRI facilities nationwide reported 2.7B lb of on-site chemical releases in the latest year.
The Toxic Release Inventory was created after the Bhopal disaster to give communities the right to know what chemicals are being released into their air, water, and land. Under the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act, facilities in specific industries (manufacturing, mining, utilities, federal facilities) that exceed chemical-specific reporting thresholds have to submit annual reports disclosing how much of each listed chemical they released on-site, transferred off-site, or otherwise managed as waste.
About 23,331 U.S. facilities file TRI reports each year, covering roughly 770 chemicals. These aren't only "chemical plants" in the Dow/DuPont sense — they include refineries, steel mills, paper mills, electronics manufacturers, metal finishers, coal-fired power plants, mining operations, and any large factory whose process uses or produces a listed chemical in quantity.
TRI is a lower bound on industrial chemical pollution. It does not include:
It does cover the things most people mean when they say "chemical plant": the 20,000+ industrial facilities whose stacks and outfalls are EPA's main target for chemical emissions regulation.