MapEcos is a collaborative website designed to provide an evenhanded view of industrial environmental performance. It combines information on industrial pollution with information from facility managers about their environmental improvement efforts. In other words, MapEcos is the first public website to tell both sides of the story.

Our information on industrial pollution comes from the US Environmental Protection Agency. MapEcos locates and summarizes pollution information for all of the facilities that reported to the agency's Toxic Release Inventory in 2005 (the most recent year for which data are available).

Our information about how managers are improving their facility's performance comes from the facility managers themselves. We have asked (via email) a representative from each of over 20,000 facilities to tell us about their environmental management, and we encouraged them to post this information on MapEcos.

On MapEcos, you can search for facilities by name, corporate ownership, industry, and emissions level. You can also find the top emitters in any county or state. You can go to a particular location (address, city, or zip code), or you can just browse the map.

For each facility, we provide information about the volume of chemicals released directly into the environment by the facility (what we call onsite emissions), a hazard score for these emissions, and comparison information about trends and emissions from analogous facilities. Each facility also includes an "Management" tab which displays all of the data about a facility's environmental management that managers chose to divulge.