August 25, 2026 — Industry makes the everyday goods we rely on — steel, cement, aluminum, coffee, cheese, and more — and provides critical jobs that have historically built the U.S. middle class. But the way heavy industry currently operates carries steep costs for people's health and the environment.

A new mapping tool of more than 2,400 industrial facilities across the U.S. reveals how industrial pollution shapes everyday life in communities nationwide. The Industrial Equity Mapper, created by research and policy organization Industrious Labs, finds that 2 in 3 people in the U.S. — roughly 240 million people — live in the same county as a major emitting industrial facility.

The problem isn't just that industrial facilities are widespread — it's that when multiple industries cluster within the same county, their pollution compounds, and so does the toll on nearby communities.

And the burden of that pollution isn't shared evenly. The 10 counties with the highest concentration of large polluting facilities — nearly 200 facilities in total — are home to communities that are 75% Black, indigenous, or people of color, nearly double the national average, with poverty rates well above the national average as well.

The Industrial Equity Mapper — subtitled Stories of Industrial Pollution in the U.S. — is a data and storytelling tool that draws on health, demographic, economic, and pollution data alongside dozens of interviews with people living in industrial communities across the country. Deep dives into 36 regions nationwide offer a closer look at how industry shapes local communities.

This new data emerges during a time when there has been a massive rollback of clean air protections and measures to protect environmental justice communities from pollution. This month, EPA sent a rule for review to rescind parts of the agency’s nondiscrimination regulations designed to ensure federal relief reaches low-income communities and communities of color. EPA has taken EJScreen offline, removing one of the federal tools communities and researchers used to see where pollution and demographic burdens overlap. And earlier this year, EPA announced it would stop considering public health impacts when setting clean air regulations. Amid these erasures, the Industrial Equity Mapper seeks to provide greater transparency and tools for community members to map and see in sharp relief the consequences of pollution from nearby facilities, including cancer risks, asthma rates, and exposure of health-harming air pollutants like particulate matter and ozone.

“This tool fills a critical gap in what the EPA and the Trump administration choose to ignore – the quantitative raw facts and real life stories of the health and economic realities faced by people living near industrial facilities and pollution,” says Victoria Chu, partner at Industrious Labs. “The Industrial Equity Mapper puts that pattern on the map, county by county, so residents, regulators, and policymakers can hold industry accountable and prove there's a better way to operate.”

Key findings from the Industrial Equity Mapper

• The U.S. is home to 2,417 industrial facilities that collectively emit 487 million tons of CO₂e and 451,000 tons of NOx annually. This is the equivalent of 113 million gas-powered vehicles driven in one year. (For scale, Los Angeles County has 6.2 million registered automobiles.)
• In the top 10 counties with the highest density of industrial facilities, 75% of residents are Black, indigenous, or people of color.
• 2.4 million people are at higher risk for long-term respiratory illness and cancer in the top 10 industrial counties due to elevated particulate matter, nitrogen oxides, and other health-harming pollutants.
• At its height, the US manufacturing sector represented 39% of total employment; today it's closer to 8%. The sector has lost 7 million jobs since the 1908s.
• The tool also provides polling and political affiliation. 66% of people in the U.S. support a transition from fossil fuels to clean energy. In 2024, the majority of people living in these industrial regions voted for Donald Trump.

The top 10 counties with the highest concentration of industrial facilities are:

1. Harris County, TX
2. Jefferson County, TX
3. Los Angeles County, CA
4. Cook County, IL
5. Calcasieu Parish, LA
6. Ascension Parish, LA
7. Wayne County, MI
8. San Bernardino County, CA
9. Lake County, IN
10. Brazoria County, TX

Voices from industrial communities

From the steel and coke facilities that have surrounded Black communities in Greater Birmingham for generations to the warehouses and diesel truck traffic reshaping San Bernardino County, California, industrial pollution takes different forms across the country. In Birmingham, Black neighborhoods are four times more likely to sit near heavy industry, including communities in an area locally known as the “toxic donut.”

In San Bernardino County – among the top 10 counties nationwide with the highest concentration of industrial facilities – a different industrial landscape has grown around homes and schools, with warehouses, cement plants and streams of diesel trucks in a county where 76% of residents are people of color and 640 schools sit within a half-mile of a mega-warehouse. The tool includes deep dives from 36 case studies showcasing how industry shapes local communities.

"The residents living here are ground zero. We're the ones suffering … so we need to be at the table negotiating, too,” says Keisha Brown, resident of Harriman Park and member of Greater Birmingham Alliance to Stop Pollution (GASP), ENACT Alabama, and the UAB Superfund Group in Birmingham, Alabama.

"Our community is living in a toxic soup. Oxnard's two paper plants are among the biggest polluters in the region, unleashing a hazardous mix of pollutants that we breathe every day that are linked to the higher risk of asthma, bronchitis, lung cancer, and heart disease,” says Lucia Marquez, policy director of Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy (CAUSE) in Oxnard, California. “And it doesn’t have to be this way — clean energy alternatives exist.”

Solutions

The Industrial Equity Mapper also highlights the organizations and communities working to transform industry into a force for good. Across the country, that work takes many forms: community groups pushing for greater transparency into what facilities are actually emitting, residents installing their own air monitors to fill gaps left by insufficient regulatory oversight, and coalitions advocating for industry to adopt cleaner, lower-polluting technologies. Together, these efforts show that a different way of doing business is possible.

Learn more at: www.industrialequitymapper.org

About Industrious Labs

Industrious Labs is an organization dedicated to transforming heavy industry to drive solutions that cut pollution, create good jobs, and build healthier, more equitable communities. Learn more at www.industriouslabs.org.

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