Waste emissions surrounding each university
The information portrayed in the chart below was gathered from the EPA and compiled to show the types of emissions found within .7 miles of each campus and the occurrence of each type. Some of the campuses are in more rural areas and there is an obvious correlation between those campuses and lower occurrence of waste and emissions within .7 miles, and this should be taken into account while processing the information in this graph.
Because the following five types of emissions and waste sites were most common, we chose to represent them in our data. These five categories are Superfund sites, hazardous waste sites, toxic releases to water, toxic releases to air and toxic releases to land. By far, hazardous waste sites are much more commonplace because they include any location where hazardous waste is disposed of, including hospitals, retirement homes, factories, restaurants, schools and even homes. Because the term hazardous waste includes anything that may damage the environment or the health of those living in the environment, such as paint solvent, cleaners, pesticides and even batteries, it is easy to see why the amount of such sites looks staggering. Superfund sites showed the great fluctuation from school-to-school, some had zero Superfund sites within the radius, like Mississippi State, while other campuses had up to four, like the University of South Carolina. This is important to note when considering the health of students enrolled and living at these campuses because the Superfund program is actually a government-ran protocol to clean up uncontrolled hazardous waste sites, sites that were once dangerous to the safety of nearby residents.
The other three categories, toxic releases to water, toxic releases to air and toxic releases to land, also varied greatly from one campus to the next, because of, in part, the amount of industry and population in the immediate area surrounding each school. Our results show that students with preexisting health conditions, or those who are at risk for certain conditions may find that some campuses are more conducive to a healthy life than other. For instance, someone who has bronchitis, or other respiratory problems, might have more health issues living at Vanderbilt, which has 10 known toxic releases to the air within .7 miles, than if they lived at Auburn University, which has only one. While these findings may not be the deciding factor in which SEC school prospective students choose to attend, it is something that should at least be considered by healthy people, and more importantly, by people with preexisting health conditions, whom the occurrence of waste and emissions could greatly affect.