PA’s Enviro Justice Zones Grew 35% This Year — Now 1 in 5 Residents

How much of Pennsylvania is a so-called "environmental justice" (EJ) area? We get that question from readers, and frankly, we've never had a solid answer. In 2023, then-DEP Secretary Rich Negrin said he thought "75% of Pennsylvania" would end up as EJ communities, and MDN repeated that number. So we went to DEP's own mapping tool, PennEnviroScreen, pulled the data behind it, and did the math. The answer: about 22% of Pennsylvanians live in an EJ area, which covers 11% of the state's land (16% if you count DEP's half-mile buffer). That's nowhere near 75%. But here's the catch: the map grew a lot this year, and with Democrats about to control all of Harrisburg, the rules tied to it could get much tougher.

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