About this Project

In collaboration with EJCAN (Environmental Justice Community Action Network), Southern Coalition for Social Justice created the Sampson County Landfill Origin Explorer. Using this tool, residents, advocates, and other stakeholders can visualize all of the NC counties that have contributed to the Sampson County regional landfill since 2005.

This tool will give users direct access to the data that solid waste facilities like the Sampson County landfill report to the NC Department of Environmental Quality (NCDEQ). One of the challenges with that data is that those facilities only report the counties from which they directly receive waste. It does not give a sense of which counties contribute to the a landfill via transfer stations Waste transfer stations are facilities where municipal solid waste is unloaded from collection vehicles and briefly held while it is reloaded onto larger long-distance transport vehicles for shipment to landfills or other treatment or disposal facilities .

For example, the Sampson County landfill received nearly 400,000 tons of solid waste from Durham County between July 2020 and July 2021. But there are several transfer stations in Durham County which received solid waste from nearby counties before transporting it to its final destination in Sampson County

This tool makes it possible to see both the direct and indirect sources of solid waste in the Sampson County landfill by including data reported by the landfill itself, as well as all of the transfer stations that have contributed to it since 2005.

If you have other datasets you'd like us to include in this tool, or ideas for us to make it more useful to your needs, we encourage you to reach out. We are sharing this tool now so that it can be used immediately in education, advocacy, and research efforts, but we are excited to continue improving it over time. If you have any questions or suggestions, please reach out to katie@scsj.org. We cannot guarantee that we will be able to respond to all inquiries.

View and download the NCDEQ Permitted Solid Waste Facility data here.

Hog facility data is retrieved directly from NCDEQ Animal Feed Operation map. It shows the most up-to-date publicly available data. View and download here.

View the source code here.



Created by Klaus Mayr, Southern Coalition for Social Justice