Environmental Integrity Project

When most people think about greenhouse gas emissions, they think about gas-guzzling vehicles and coal-fired power plants. They don’t talk trash. That’s not the case with Environmental Integrity Project attorneys Ryan Maher and Leah Kelly. They recently authored a ground-breaking investigative report that revealed that Maryland’s landfills are releasing four times more methane and carbon dioxide i...

President-Elect Joe Biden has picked North Carolina’s top environmental regulator, Michael Regan, as his choice to run the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. How has Regan performed in his job as Secretary of the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality? And what challenges will he face rebuilding an EPA devastated by deregulation, staffing cuts, and control by industry lobbyists duri...

As the incoming Biden Administration makes plans for its environmental agenda over the next four years, we interview a national leader in the environmental justice movement about how the White House can prioritize protecting minority and lower-income communities that have long been neglected. Dr. Mustafa Santiago Ali, a Vice President the National Wildlife Federation, worked for 24 years at the U....

Charlie Reeves grew up in public housing in South Philadelphia near the oldest and largest oil refinery on the East Coast, the Point Breeze Refinery, later owned by Sunoco and then Philadelphia Energy Solutions. Back in the 1970s, his father led public protests at City Hall and Sunoco headquarters over what he was convinced was toxic air pollution from the plant that was harming his family’s healt...

Brent Walls, the Upper Potomac Riverkeeper in Western Maryland, dedicated his life to fighting for clean water in the Nation’s River after he experienced a moment of clarity. He was serving in the U.S. Navy aboard the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Constellation when he witnessed a routine procedure during his first cruise in the Pacific Ocean. “Twice a day, once in the morning and once in the evening, t...

Anne Rolfes is the Founding Director of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, a nonprofit group that, for the last two decades, has been campaigning for public health protections for mostly lower-income families living just beyond the fences of chemical factories. Her advocacy for air pollution controls has long made her a target for Louisiana’s powerful chemical industry. But recently, her protests again...

The poultry industry is growing in the Chesapeake Bay region, with a new generation of mega-sized chicken houses and more ammonia air pollution. On Virginia’s Eastern Shore, Carlene Zach, a 60-year-old retired postmaster, and her husband Peter Zach, 62, a lineman for an electric company, were in good health until a poultry farm opened next door with 24 airplane hangar-sized buildings holding a mil...

Juan Flores grew up near Houston, the son of a refinery worker who repeatedly warned his children of the risks of going into his profession...and then died on the job. Juan became a community coordinator for nonprofit Air Alliance Houston, and now works to protect the people of Baytown and other neighborhoods from air pollution, fires, and explosions. A new report by the Environmental Integrity Pr...

For years, fishing guide Rod Bates has been taking families out on the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania and letting kids swim and play in the water. Then he learned about something disturbing being piped into the river from the Governor's Mansion and State Office Complex in Harrisburg, the state capital. The Environmental Integrity Project and Lower Susquehanna Riverkeeper investigated the outfal...

One of the biggest sources of water pollution in the U.S. is runoff pollution from farms and livestock operations. But a new Environmental Integrity Project study found that only 19 percent of livestock farmers in Virginia's two largest agricultural counties are fencing their animals out of waterways, creating unhealthy bacteria levels and algal blooms in the Shenandoah River and Chesapeake Bay.

Coal's Poisonous Legacy by Environmental Integrity Podcast

The Environmental Integrity Project examined two decades of EPA data and concluded that environmental enforcement under the Trump Administration in 2018 set record lows for civil penalties against polluters, inspections, and people charged with environmental crimes. In our report, “Less Enforcement: Communities at Risk,” we give 10 examples across the U.S., from Louisiana to Minnesota, of well-doc...

What is the environmental impact of the food you eat? We investigate the water pollution produced by the meat processing industry. The nonprofit, nonpartisan Environmental Integrity Project examined federal records for 98 large slaughterhouses across the U.S. that discharge into rivers and streams and found that 75 percent of them violate the federal Clean Water Act by dumping illegal amounts of f...