What Is EPA ECHO?

What ECHO actually is

ECHO is EPA's central public database for compliance and enforcement history. It doesn't cover one environmental law — it aggregates records across several federal programs at once, including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), which governs hazardous waste.

Most day-to-day hazardous-waste inspection and enforcement work is actually done by state environmental agencies, not EPA directly — states are authorized to run their own RCRA programs under federal oversight. ECHO is where that state-level work gets consolidated into one federal system, so a compliance history isn't scattered across 50 separate state databases.

The hazardous-waste-specific program inside ECHO is called RCRAInfo. It's the one US Waste Index actually draws from — every permit, inspection, violation, and enforcement record on this site traces back to a RCRAInfo record inside ECHO.

What data ECHO provides

For a hazardous-waste facility, a RCRAInfo record in ECHO typically carries: its RCRA handler classification (whether it's registered as a generator, transporter, or treatment/storage/disposal facility, and at what size — see our guide on generator size classes); its inspection and evaluation history; any recorded violations, each with the date it was found and, if resolved, the date it was closed; and any formal or informal enforcement actions and penalties that followed.

ECHO also publishes a rolled-up compliance summary for each facility — a 3-year compliance status, counts of inspections and enforcement actions over the last 5 years, total penalties, and a "Significant Non-Complier" (SNC) flag for facilities with the most serious, ongoing compliance problems (see our SNC guide). Every one of these fields carries its own date, and the summary itself carries a snapshot date showing when it was last refreshed.

These are the exact fields behind every EPA-sourced profile on US Waste Index — nothing is estimated or filled in when a source record doesn't have a value. See our Methodology page for the full field-by-field source map.

How US Waste Index uses ECHO data

US Waste Index rebuilds its compliance data from EPA's ECHO Exporter and RCRAInfo extract on a periodic refresh — not in real time. Every profile reflects the most recent ingested snapshot, dated, not a live feed.

This data sits in a read-only layer that a claimed listing cannot edit. A vendor who claims their profile can add contact details, hours, and a description — they cannot change a permit, a violation, or any other compliance figure sourced from ECHO. See our Editorial Policy for the full list of what a claim can and can't touch.

What ECHO data can and can't tell you

ECHO/RCRAInfo classifies a facility's regulatory handler role — generator, transporter, TSDF — but it doesn't classify what specific waste stream a business handles day to day. A facility permitted as a hazardous-waste transporter, for example, isn't tagged in ECHO as "handles medical waste" or "handles electronics" — RCRA permitting doesn't carry that level of detail, and several waste categories (medical waste among them) aren't primarily federally regulated under RCRA at all.

An "open" violation on a record also isn't the same as an active lawsuit or an ongoing crisis — it means EPA's record shows no resolved date as of the latest snapshot, which can reflect anything from a serious unresolved problem to routine paperwork lag. See our guide on what an open violation means for the detail.

Because of this, US Waste Index never presents a facility's overall compliance status as a blanket claim based on ECHO data alone — every such statement cites its specific basis and date, per our Editorial Policy's "what we do not do" section.

A real example: reading one facility's ECHO record

Below is a real facility's compliance summary as it stands on US Waste Index today, sourced live from the same ECHO/RCRAInfo data every profile on this site uses. Note how each figure maps back to a specific field described above: the permit type is its RCRA handler classification, the violation counts come from its individual violation records (total vs. still-open), and the SNC flag and penalty total come straight from ECHO's rolled-up compliance summary — all as of the same snapshot date.

FAQ

Primary sources

This guide is reference material compiled by US Waste Index, not original regulatory guidance — verify anything time-sensitive or high-stakes directly against these primary sources.

• EPA ECHO (Enforcement and Compliance History Online)
• EPA RCRAInfo
• RCRA regulations (40 CFR Parts 260-279)