Washington, DC — Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI), and ToxicDocs.org today launched Eyes on Environmental Enforcement, a new online search portal that gives the public direct access to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) enforcement records that have been historically difficult to obtain and were not previously available in a searchable, centralized format.

The portal, available at www.eyesonenforcement.org, brings together inspection reports, notices of violation, and related documents obtained by PEER from EPA through the federal Freedom of Information Act. The website:

• makes enforcement records about inspections and violations searchable in one place;
• helps communities near polluting facilities understand a facility’s enforcement history; and
• supports journalists and researchers investigating oversight and enforcement trends.

The portal currently covers 2021 through 2025, with some records from 2026, and includes records under three major environmental laws: the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, a law covering the management of hazardous waste. The site will be updated to improve its functionality and to add additional records as PEER obtains them, allowing the site to become more complete over time.

The portal provides access to a large body of enforcement records that the public has never seen. Analysis of just one small part of those holdings, EPA’s landfill inspections, has already turned up striking findings. Large landfills must control methane once levels exceed 500 parts per million (ppm). Yet EPA inspectors measured methane above that limit at 677 locations at just twelve landfills. In fact, at 200 locations within these landfills, levels ran from 5,000 to over 200,000 ppm, or 10 to more than 100 times the limit. At eight of the twelve landfills, the largest leaks exceeded 50,000 ppm, methane’s lower explosive limit. Landfills already account for more than 14 percent of U.S. methane emissions, a greenhouse gas more than 80 times as potent as carbon dioxide over 20 years.

Merlin Chowkwanyun, a professor at Columbia University and the principal investigator at ToxicDocs.org, says, “The mission of Toxic Docs has always been to offer our platform to other transparency endeavors who could use it. We’re delighted to work with EDGI and PEER on this and look forward to evolving the work in the future.”

“Pollution laws only work if they’re being enforced, ” says Chris Sellers, project coordinator at EDGI and Distinguished Professor of History at Stony Brook University. “Yet many records of whether the EPA is actually tracking down and punishing local polluters have been incredibly difficult to access — until now. Drawing on PEER’s valiant FOIAing, this new portal makes EPA’s enforcement records more transparent and retrievable than ever, providing a vital service to anyone seeking information on whether industries are violating the law at the expense of peoples’ health.”

“This site will help set a new standard for the kind of data management and transparency EPA itself should adopt going forward. In the age of AI, there is no excuse for EPA not establishing a cost-effective way to share basic environmental enforcement information online with the citizens it’s supposed to serve — especially when that information affects their health and safety. This site is an important step in making sure that happens,” says Tim Whitehouse, PEER’s executive director.

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Visit the Eyes on Environmental Enforcement portal

Read more about methane inspections discussed in this release

Revisit PEER’s report on the collapse of environmental enforcement under Trump’s EPA

About PEER: PEER protects public employees who protect our environment, natural resources, and public health. We support current and former environmental and public health professionals, land managers, scientists, enforcement officers, and other civil servants dedicated to upholding environmental laws and values across federal, state, local, and tribal governments.

About EDGI: The Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) is a network of researchers, technologists, and advocates that monitors, archives, and analyzes public environmental data and governance.