International Industrial Ecology Day 2021

Toxic chemicals have impacts on climate change, the ecosystem, and human health. There is increasing interest in pollution inequality of toxic chemicals across regions and demographic groups. In this paper, we employed a multi-regional input-output (MRIO) model, using the American MRIO table and toxic chemical release data in 2017, to calculate the production and consumption-based toxic release of each state, and the inter-regional transfer of embodied toxic release between states. Then, this paper analyzed the toxic release footprint and inter-state transfer of embodied toxic release by income groups between states. The results show that the production-based toxic release is unequally distributed across regions in the US, mainly concentrating on certain central states and the Great Lakes Region. The consumption-based toxic release is less unequally distributed across regions in the US. The toxic release footprint inequality is quite obvious between different income groups in each state. In general, the richer the household is, the larger the TRI pounds footprint per household is. The inter-state transfer of embodied toxic release triggered by poor households is mainly focused on poor states, such as Texas, Ohio, Michigan, Louisiana, and etc., while the transfer triggered by rich households mainly occurs between the rich and poor states.