Public data, still public
EJScreen, after EPA took it down
EPA removed its Environmental Justice Screening and Mapping tool on 5 February 2025, and shut it down the following month. The tool is gone. The data is not — it is a US federal government work, it was never in copyright, and it is still downloadable. Here it is on a map again.
California
The pattern is the point: 3,012 of California’s tracts score zero, while 1,042 sit in the national top fifth on eleven of the thirteen.
Open the live map →Texas
Texas reads along its industry rather than its cities — the Houston ship channel, the Permian, and the border colonias each show up as their own band of colour.
Open the live map →New York
New York splits hard between the five boroughs and everywhere else, and the within-city variation is sharper than the state-wide one — neighbouring tracts in the Bronx sit at opposite ends of the scale.
Open the live map →What the colour means
EJScreen combines thirteen environmental indicators — particulate matter, ozone, diesel particulates, traffic proximity, lead paint, proximity to Superfund, risk-management-plan and hazardous-waste sites, wastewater discharge, nitrogen dioxide, drinking water and underground storage tanks — with a demographic index, and reports where each census tract sits against the rest of the country.
These maps colour each tract by how many of the thirteen it lands in the national top 20% for: a single number from 0 to 13. It is a blunt measure and a legible one. The pattern it shows is concentration — in California 3,012 tracts score zero while 1,042 score eleven. Burden stacks up in particular places rather than spreading out.
Every indicator keeps EPA's own field name — PM25,
DSLPM, PTRAF, P_DEMOGIDX_2 — so the EJScreen
technical documentation still describes the columns you are looking at.
Where this copy comes from
EPA's own service stopped answering. The archival copy used here is the Harvard Dataverse deposit made by the Public Environmental Data Partners after the shutdown — specifically the tract-level file with US-relative percentiles from the 2024 release, version 2.32.
Several ArcGIS mirrors of EJScreen are also circulating. They are worth knowing about and worth checking: two of the most visible ones are labelled as census tracts but actually contain 243,022 block groups, and the one genuine tract service carries state-relative rather than national percentiles. Percentiles that compare a tract to its own state answer a different question from percentiles that compare it to the country.
Download the data
Plain CSV, one row per census tract, 35 columns. The join key is GEOID, the
standard 11-digit census tract identifier — the leading zero matters
(California is 06).
| ejscreen-2.32-tracts-ca.csv | 9,107 tracts | 2.0 MB |
| ejscreen-2.32-tracts-tx.csv | 6,883 tracts | 1.4 MB |
| ejscreen-2.32-tracts-ny.csv | 5,393 tracts | 1.1 MB |
Cut per state rather than shipped as one national file, because the national tract table runs to 85,396 rows and would quietly truncate on load. If you want a state that is not here, ask — it is a one-line change.
Map your own data against it
These tracts are the same boundaries Vizzie joins any tract-keyed spreadsheet to, so a CSV of your own — sites, facilities, case counts, service locations — lands on the same map as the EJScreen layer. See US census tracts for how the codes are built and what they roll up into.
Open Vizzie Open the California map
EJScreen version 2.32 (2024) — U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. US Government
public domain (17 U.S.C. §105); attributed here as good practice rather than obligation.
Archived copy: Harvard Dataverse doi:10.7910/DVN/RLR5AX, retrieved
22 September 2026. Tract boundaries: U.S. Census Bureau 2020 cartographic boundary files.
Vizzie is not affiliated with EPA.