Landfills In the United States ›
Full List of Landfills Raw JSON
Our country is populated with sanitary landfills, but where are they? By using the Environmental Protection Agency's MSW permit database, this map plots all of the landfills in the country starting with the ones closest to you. A Landfill Near You
//Request JSON Feed
var url = opentrashlab.com/api/landfills
Landfill API
Use the Landfill API to access data about all of the
landfills located in the United States.
Landfill Hunting ›
Landfill Hunting is a application for PyBossa that allows you to crowdsource landfill data using Microsoft Bing images.
This application uses location information from the EPA regarding landfills across the United States. The information specifies the latitude and longitude of landfills as well as other miscellaneous information about each individual landfill. Through this PyBossa app, researchers at Open Trash Lab hope to increase landfill awareness as well as contribute data to help better understand landfills and bring that information into the public discourse.
With this app, we are asking participants to use Microsoft Bing images to identify and outline landfills throughout the United States. Once completed, we will begin to process and visualize the data in order to bring about awareness of trash and further the scientific discourse around landfills. We also plan to deploy a series of PyBossa apps that crowdsource other information such the surrounding environment of a landfill including homes, schools, waterways and urban dwellings.
Data and the Government Shutdown
The Landfill API was developed during the 2013 government shutdown. Prior to the government shutdown, this data from the EPA was being used to map the locations of all of the landfills in the country. In order to accomplish this, it was necessary to compile all of the data from the EPA Echo database into a single JSON file. This file contained all of the columns and fields in the EPA Echo database related to landfills.
When the 2013 government shutdown took place, the EPA Echo database become offline. Thus, the data which had previously been harvested from the EPA Echo database and used in the 'A Landfill Near Your' project, was now the only accessible data concerning the status of landfills throughout the country. Therefore, the importance of sharing this data was clearly seen and the Landfill API was developed to share what could not be found elsewhere.
Following the reopening of the government, the EPA Echo database has returned to operational status allowing public access to landfill information. This incident, however, provided even further reasoning for citizen involvement in data acquisition, storage and analysis. The Landfill API will continue to operate on the Open Trash Lab website for as long as there are landfills to produce data.