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Smart Sectors

Sector Snapshots

What are Sector Snapshots?

The sector snapshots are a new, interactive tool that provide environmental and economic information about industries participating in EPA’s Smart Sectors program. The sector snapshots employ a novel approach by assembling a range of environmental and economic data from different publicly-available sources to provide an integrated, easy–to–understand overview for each sector over the last 20 years.

Features Include:

Sector snapshots generally include three components:

  • A home page that allows users to browse graphics: high-level contextual information about the sector.
  • An interactive chart viewer with environmental indicators and economic information for the sector over time. It allows users to analyze sector-level trends, and compare environmental indicators to economic benchmarks. Users can also toggle to display recessions and other relevant events for each sector. Four sectors are presented as navigable pdfs and do not include the interactive chart viewer: agriculture, construction, electronics/technology, and ports/maritime transportation.
  • A summary page that provides high-level narrative about the sector’s operations and offers users a variety of links to additional information.

Background

Similar to the goal of the performance reports created by EPA's Sector Strategies program in the 2000s, EPA's Smart Sectors program strives to provide the general public, industry, and EPA a common understanding of environmental and economic performance over time. To accomplish this goal, the sector "snapshot" aggregates and shares a large enough set of publicly-available data over a 20-year time period to depict U.S. industry performance. To provide any feedback about how the program could improve the snapshots, please reach out via the "contact us" link below.