EPA Superfund Mashup: Exposing Environmental Hazards In Your Area

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The Idea:

What will change in the world because this Project happens?

A Superfund site is an uncontrolled or abandoned place where hazardous waste is located, possibly affecting local ecosystems or people. Sites are listed on the National Priorities List (NPL) upon completion of Hazard Ranking System (HRS) screening, public solicitation of comments about the proposed site, and after all comments have been addressed.

For many years, I lived in a very large Superfund site area without knowing and I'm sure many are in the same situation. This is because the EPA's pollution information is buried in the files on the web that are not easily human readable. Even the information provided by the EPA is only cursory, naming possible hazards and whether is has yet been deemed "clean."

Pollution Cleanup The "EPA Superfund Mashup: Exposing Environmental Hazards In Your Area" Project will make the 200+ Superfund Site's information visually available and human readable. It will promote engagement and accountability in private and public cleanup efforts and encourage those who live and work in those areas to document cleanup efforts and the human effect of large scale air, water, and soil pollution.

What information will people interact with to make this change?

Online, users with interact with photos, videos, public posts and detailed EPA data.

Offline, people will be encouraged to document cleanup (or lack of clean up) activities and human stories of how living in such an area effects their lives.

They can send tagged data to flickr, youtube, and post stories on blogs that will then be parsed to the correct Superfund site, making documentation collaborative, public and dynamic.

What else have you done in this Cause Area?

See StopNewNukes.org for an example of the first project. I worked with Peace Action West to create this mashup and action. It shows you all of the places in the U.S. that have been effected by nuclear waste already (including a flickr feed of photos from those places) and sends you off to send a letter to Theodore Wyka, the manager of the Complex 2030 project over at the Dept. of Energy telling him that you don't want anymore nuclear development funding.

THe EPA Superfund Mashup: Exposing Environmental Cleanup In Your Area will be V2 of this project. It will encompass all 200+ superfund sites, including evironmentally disastrous things like oil spills and corporate pollution (instead of just radioactive cleanup).