Inequitable Distribution of High Pollution Sites in King County, WA

In this project we used data from the US Census Bureau, King County, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the US Geological Survey as inputs for a Areal Weighted Interpolation and dasymmetric mapping to estimate populations within a 4km buffer around Toxic Release Index (TRI) and Superfund sites in King County. 

For the environmental justice portion of the analysis, we looked specifically at the relative proportion of BIPOC people and people living in poverty inside buffers representing proximity to pollution sources. 

Other portions of the project involved experimenting with different categorization of visual information (natural breaks, standard deviations, quartiles, etc.) and how that impacts interpretation, as well as how normalizing an absolute metric by area or relative to another metric can change the way the data is displayed, interpreted, and used.

The outcome of this analysis revealed that a higher portion of BIPOC and impoverished populations live within 4km of these pollution sites than outside of that buffer zone.