For decades, Ohio’s backroads have quietly carried more than just traffic. They’ve carried waste.
Since 1985, local governments across the state have filed annual reports with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources documenting how much oil and gas brine was spread on their roads as a deicer or dust suppressant. Each “Annual Surface Application Report Form 15” tells a piece of a much larger story about where this waste has gone and how long it has been part of daily life in Ohio.
This semester, Buckeye Environmental Network’s organizer Anton Krieger sponsored a pilot project that aims to make those records visible to the public. In partnership with Dr. Valencia Prentice and students from Cleveland State University’s Urban Studies GIS Program, the project takes nearly forty years of archived brine records and turns them into something communities can actually see.
The students worked with Dr. Prentice to learn GIS mapping skills using real data from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. Through this collaboration, they produced maps that show how many barrels of oil and gas waste were spread on each road in a township. Seeing those maps brings the data to life in a way that spreadsheets never could.
Anton described why this project matters.
“It’s one thing to hear that brine spreading happens across Ohio,” he said. “It’s another to look at a map and realize it happened right on your road.”
This collaboration is an example of what community science can look like when organizers, educators, and students work together. It builds technical skills in the classroom while deepening public understanding of an issue that affects people where they live.
By mapping these records, the Cleveland State students are helping to translate complex data into accessible, visual stories that can help residents and advocates see the scale of waste spreading for themselves. The maps will also help BEN organize at the local level by providing clear evidence of where and how oil and gas waste has been applied for decades.
The team hopes to share these maps on the Buckeye Environmental Network website soon so communities can explore the data directly. For many, this will be the first time seeing a visual record of how oil and gas waste has been spread on their own roads.
Projects like this make it clear that environmental transparency starts with collaboration. When organizers and educators join forces, data becomes more than numbers. It becomes a tool for awareness, accountability, and change.
For more information about Radioactive Brine Spreading, watch Anton’s presentation on it here.
