environmental justice

- by Kaya Banton, Chester Environmental Justice

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"499","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"360","style":"line-height: 20.671998977661133px; width: 333px; height: 250px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;","width":"480"}}]]My name is Kaya Banton and I have been a resident of Chester, Pennsylvania all of my life.  Chester is a small city right outside of Philadelphia known as one of the worst cases of environmental racism.

There are a number of polluting facilities in and surrounding Chester. The most famous is Covanta, the nation’s largest waste incinerator, burning 3,510 tons of trash per day. Though Covanta is the largest incinerator in the country, they have the fewest pollution controls of any incinerator in the nation. Within a mile of Covanta, 80% of the population is black. Only 1.5% of waste being burned at Covanta comes from Chester. The rest comes from wealthy suburban areas of Delaware County, Philadelphia, and New York.

Covanta is the largest polluter in Chester and one of the largest in all of eastern Pennsylvania.  Due to the pollutants from Covanta and other industries, many people in Chester have cancer, asthma, and other horrific diseases. I know entire families that have asthma or cancer. Both my mother and my little sister developed chronic asthma after moving to Chester. The childhood asthma hospitalization rate in Chester is three times the state average.

With research and organizing support from Energy Justice Network last summer, community members went door to door last year and packed city hall twice, winning a unanimous vote of the planning commission, recommending that city council shoot down plans for the rail box building to receive New York City's steel trash containers. Unfortunately, city council voted in favor of Covanta because they did not want to get sued. Covanta was permitted to bring New York’s trash by rail, which will put them at full capacity. A big concern from the council was the amount of trash trucks coming through the city. Covanta said that since the trash will be coming by rail, the truck traffic will be decreased majorly, but even though residents made it clear that the trash containers will be taken through Chester by train to Wilmington, Delaware then back into Chester by truck. This will not decrease truck traffic, but will only increase pollution by adding train traffic.

I did some research and found out that New York’s zero waste plan is actually a “zero waste to landfill” plan that locked in 20 to 30 years of burning waste in Chester, making the impacts of my city invisible while New York gets the benefit of looking green. I was incredibly confused as to how New York City environmental justice groups could celebrate the announcement of a zero waste plan that allowed waste to be burned in Chester. We give toxic tours of our community upon request for those wanting to see what we experience on a daily basis.  

We invite anyone, especially those from Philadelphia and New York, to contact us for a tour.

- by Gavin Kearney (Environmental Justice Director, New York Lawyers for the Public Interest) & Eddie Bautista (Executive Director, New York City Environmental Justice Alliance)

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"494","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"294","style":"width: 300px; height: 294px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;","width":"300"}}]]New York City’s homes and businesses generate anywhere from 6 to 8 million tons of mixed solid waste every year – more than any other city in the country. And the manner in which it manages that waste is rife with injustice – a few NYC communities of color play host to numerous truck-intensive transfer facilities, while other communities of color as near as Newark and as far as Virginia and Ohio then receive NYC’s waste for landfilling and incineration. For over a decade we have been working with environmental justice advocates and other allies in NYC to address these issues. We have achieved some important incremental victories over pitched opposition. But much remains to be done. 

Ultimately, if it is to do right by Environmental Justice (EJ) communities, NYC needs to greatly diminish the amount of material it exports for disposal and build local recycling infrastructure while minimizing community impacts, creating a safer workplace for waste workers, and reducing environmental harms.  To build the will for this within the City we are working to expand the local discussion around solid waste to encompass worker well-being, economic development, climate change, fair treatment for small businesses, and, of course, environmental justice. This is the focus of our current, ongoing campaign for solid waste reform – Transform Don’t Trash NYC.

- by Richard Piersol, March 1, 2015, Lincoln Journal Star

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"399","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 222px; height: 125px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;","title":"Photo: New York Times"}}]]About a thousand tons of contaminated soil from the notorious Love Canal environmental disaster in New York is being shipped by rail to Kimball for incineration because the company that is disposing of it ran into objections from Canadians, who didn't want it.

Love Canal, a neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York, became a symbol for environmental abuse in the late 1970s when it was discovered that 22,000 tons of toxic waste had been buried there by Hooker Chemical Co. and then ignored for decades by local authorities.

Property development, weather and the removal of a heavy clay cap released the toxic waste and allowed it to leach under the town, leading to widespread and severe health consequences, vast litigation and finally, the federal Superfund law. 

- by Brentin Mock, February 24, 2015, Grist

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"398","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"270","style":"width: 333px; height: 187px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;","width":"480"}}]]It’s well-established that the Environmental Protection Agency has been quite flaccid when it comes to enforcing civil rights issues. The online news outlet E&E recently took the time to remind us how bad it is last week, reporting from Flint, Mich., where environmental justice complaints about a biomass energy plant built in a low-income, black community have gone ignored since the early 1990s.

“In that corner of Flint, there is just a lot of polluting stuff that’s either in Genesee Township or the northeast side of Flint, and nothing has ever really been done about that,” Rev. Phil Schmitter told E&E reporter Robin Bravender. “The plant is about a mile from an elementary school and a low-income housing complex.”

Back in 1994, environmental justice activists in Flint asked the EPA to block construction of the biomass plant, arguing that low-income African Americans have already suffered enough from the concentration of pollution and poverty in the northeastern quarter. The EPA noted the request, and it’s on the agency’s list of civil rights complaints, filed July 1, 1994 as one of the few cases accepted for investigation. But here we are, over 20 years later, and the situation hasn’t been resolved. The plant has been up and running since 1995, burning wood to energy to its merry delight.

Now, the EPA’s lack of action on civil rights enforcement deserves scrutiny, even as the agency has taken steps like creating Plan EJ 2014, a detailed proposal for correcting this problem. And certainly there are cumulative impact questions that need to be answered in Flint. But as much as anything, the story of the Flint biomass plant reveals just how complicated these issues can be.

- by Brentin Mock, Grist

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"338","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"270","style":"width: 333px; height: 187px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;","width":"480"}}]]In North Carolina, scientists from the Environmental Protection Agency have found a “stable and negative association” between poor birth outcomes among women and their exposure to air pollution. That’s pretty much common knowledge, if not common sense, no matter what state or country you look at. But the EPA scientists also noted that “more socially disadvantaged populations are at a greater risk,” even when subjected to the same levels of air pollutants.

Translation: If you have the misfortune of being born poor and black in North Carolina, you’re more likely to arrive in this world underweight and undernourished, on top of being underprivileged. Polluted air only makes your situation worse.

The study, published in the January 2014 Journal of Environmental Health, covered women who gave birth between 2002 and 2006 across the entire state. It was built upon a catalog of previous surveys that have found “significant and persistent racial and socioeconomic” disparities for poor birth outcomes like infant mortality, low birth weight, and premature births. Throw air pollution into the mix — particulate matter and ozone, which the EPA researchers measured in the study — and the disparities deepen.

Never fear, the December issue of Energy Justice Now — the national forum for the Dirty Energy Resistance — is here!

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"334","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"480","style":"width: 310px; height: 310px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;","width":"480"}}]]Inside this issue: Celebrating 16 Victories for Clean Air in 2014!

- 16 Victories for Clean Air

-  From Shock to Victory: The Planet’s “Immune System” at Work

-  Incinerator in Frederick, MD Canceled After Decade-Long Fight

...and more!

Please share the December 2014 issue of Energy Justice Now with your friends, colleagues, neighbors, media, and elected officials! 

Subscribe to monthly email issues of Energy Justice Now!

- by Patrice Gallagher, No Incinerator Alliance

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"331","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"320","style":"width: 333px; height: 222px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;","title":"Photo: No Incinerator Alliance","width":"480"}}]]On November 20, 2014, Frederick County, Maryland's Board of County Commissioners cancelled plans to build a 1500 ton-per-day waste-to-energy incinerator, ending a 10 year citizens' effort to kill the project and put better alternatives for community waste management in place.

The vote was 3 to 2, and all three who voted to cancel had previously supported the project.

As a citizen activist who has fought this project since 2006, it feels great to finally be able to put this terrible idea to rest, and begin to help our county focus on more recycling, repurposing and composting — perhaps in the form of a Resource Recovery Park, as many other communities around the nation are doing successfully.

How did we do it? I suppose the best answer I can give for this is: persistence. The organized opposition got its start with one woman who decided to educate herself and any other interested citizens by inviting to our community a national expert on sustainable waste management. He made a lot of sense to us... much more sense than those advocating for a large incinerator project — the Northeast Maryland Waste Disposal Authority.

We began as a loose coalition of activists from many walks of life, most of whom had no knowledge or experience in waste management, but who educated ourselves along the way and were fortunate to eventually attract national experts and environmental organizations (including Energy Justice Network), engineers, lawyers and accountants to our ranks, who shared their expertise with us and helped us make the case against incineration, and in favor of other more economically and environmentally sound ways to think about our waste as a resource to be reused, not burned.

Ready or not, here it comes: the September issue of Energy Justice Network's new publication, Energy Justice Now!

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"267","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"345","style":"width: 333px; height: 272px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;","width":"422"}}]]Inside this issue:

- “Why We Must Fight Gas-Fired Power Plants”

- “Energy Justice Summer: Standing With Communities in the Shalefields”

- “What the Frack? Scraping the Bottom of the Oil Barrel”

...and more!!!

Please share the September 2014 issue of Energy Justice Now with your friends, colleagues, neighbors, media, and elected officials!

Subscribe to monthly email issues of Energy Justice Now here.

- by Paul Tuthill, September 12, 2014, WAMC