Matt Benson

Urban GIS
Mennis
Lab 4

Introduction
In this report, New Jersey census tracts were analyzed in relation to facilities in the state
that released toxic chemicals into the environment in 2012. Socioeconomic and land cover values
were analyzed for tracts containing such facilities and those that don’t.

Data and Methods

Facilities which released chemicals into the environment are listed in the Environmental
Protection Agency’s (EPA) publicly available Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) Database, and the
data for these facilities used here were downloaded from TOXMAP, a web application
developed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The raster land cover data used in this
report was obtained from the National Land Cover Dataset (NLCD) for 2011.
These datasets were overlaid onto a New Jersey Census Tracts shapefile, which contains
the socioeconomic data used in this report. A new shapefile was created from the land cover
data, isolating only developed, high intensity land. The TRI data showed facilities for the entire
United States, and was clipped using the NJ tracts shapefile as the clip feature, creating a new
shapefile showing facilities only in NJ. This layer was then reduced to display only facilities that
released chemicals in 2012. Both of these resulting shapefiles were joined to the tracts shapefile.
Using a select by attributes function, tracts with and without facilities were each
separately selected and the appropriate data were copied from the summary window and pasted
into Excel, which was used to calculate for each of the two tract groups the percent minority,
population density, and percent developed high intensity land use.

Results
Tracts with facilities have a population that is 43.3% minority, a population density of
271 per square mile, and are 1.7% developed high intensity. Tracts without facilities have a
population that is 42.7% minority, a population density of 475 per square mile, and are 2.5%
developed high intensity.

Conclusion
The results show differences between the two tract groups. Tracts with facilities have a
higher minority population, are less population dense, and have less high intensity developed
land use. Based off of the results of the analysis, this much is known. However whether there is a
statistically significant relationship between the location of TRI facilities and these variables is
not proven by this report. Perhaps using statistics tests, a definitive relationship may yet emerge.
Tables and Figures
Figure 1

Table 1