The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has expanded on its move toward transparency and collaboration by allowing data downloads and encouraging outside analysis in an effort to harness crowdsourced participation. With the latest release of their Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) report, the agency is providing downloadable data files prior to doing its own analysis in an effort to open the analysis to outside research sources.
The 2009 TRI Preliminary Dataset is available online for download. In addition to the download capability, the EPA offers the online tool TRI Explorer, which provides a means to explore the data to identify facilities and chemical disposal or other release patterns.
