Google Earth Community: European Pollutant Emission Register

Placemark collection updated on 11 May 2008 with corrected locations for 331 sites based on community feedback via the website linked to from each balloon.

EPER is the European Pollutant Emission Register - the first European-wide register of industrial emissions into air and water.

This placemark collection contains information on the annual emissions of 11,099 industrial facilities in the 25 Member States of the EU for the year 2004.

Each balloon contains information on the name, address and activity (sector), as well as a table of emissions to air and water (direct or via a sewerage system).

To help compare one facility with another I have created a visual representation of the emissions from each site by extending a coloured polygon above the site. The width of the polygon is proportional to the number of substances emitted (reported) by each site. The height of the polygon is proportional to the size of the emissions. Red is for air emissions, blue for direct to water and yellow for indirect to water (sewerage). To calculate the height of the polygon I calculated the Z-score of each substance emitted relative to EU25 emissions. I then added the Z-scores for all the emissions of each site and divided by the square root of the number of emissions.

A red marker is used for the top polluters - these are sites that have an emission in the top 20% for that substance. There are 702 such sites. These top 20% of emissions to air, water and land are highlighted in bold in each table. To avoid clutter with 11,000 placemarks I have used regions so that only the top polluters will always show and you need to zoom into 1000km altitude to see the rest.

The coordinates provided by EPER are not always accurate. To improve this I used the Google Maps API to geocode all the premises that had an address and substituted the geocoded coordinates where there was either a good match or there was clearly some error with the coordinates. 2041 sites were geocoded in this way. Recognising that this would not have totally solved the problem I have also created a website that is linked to by each placemark where anyone can correct the location of a site.

Edited by tegandrew (05/11/08 06:20 AM)

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