Profiling the EPA — 31 APIs of Environmental Public Data

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is not a company, and that’s the point. It’s one of the clearest examples in the catalog of a government body that has turned decades of regulatory data into 31 distinct public APIs — air quality, water, hazardous waste, facility compliance, and power-sector emissions, all programmatically queryable.

Most public-data shops publish a CSV portal and call it a day. The EPA decomposed its data by program, and each program is a real API.

What’s actually in the surface

The 31 APIs cluster by environmental program:

Air quality — AQS (Air Quality System Data Mart), the canonical monitor-level air data.
Compliance and enforcement (ECHO) — a whole family: All Media Programs Facility Search, Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, RCRA Hazardous Waste, Enforcement Case Search, Detailed Facility Report, Effluent Charting. Each statute gets its own facility-search surface.
Power-sector emissions (CAM) — eight APIs covering Emissions Management, Monitoring Plan Management, QA & Certifications, Facilities, Master Data, Account Management, and Streaming Services. This is the data behind acid-rain and CO2 emissions tracking.
Water — How's My Waterway, CIP (Catchment Index Processing), ELG (Effluent Guidelines).
Cross-program — Envirofacts Data Service, the unified query layer across EPA systems, plus CSB (Clean School Bus Rebate Forms).

What’s interesting about the shape

The decomposition follows the statute. ECHO isn’t one search API — it’s one per environmental law, because each law defines a different facility universe and a different compliance schema. The contract boundary mirrors the legal boundary.
Emissions data is operational, not archival. The CAM family includes Streaming Services and Monitoring Plan Management — this is data that updates, with a management surface around it, not a static download.
A unifying layer exists. Envirofacts sits across the programs so you don’t have to know which system holds a given facility’s record. That’s the federation pattern public data usually lacks.

The takeaway

The EPA shows what civic data looks like when it’s treated as an API portfolio instead of a file dump. Thirty-one program-aligned APIs mean a researcher — or an agent — can ask about a specific facility’s Clean Water Act status without parsing an unrelated air-quality export. Walk the surface on the EPA provider page. It’s the model every public-data agency should study.