Air Date: Week of April 7, 2023

ExxonMobil’s Baton Rouge Refinery along Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley.” (Photo: Jim Bowen, Flickr CC BY 2.0)

The Black residents of the heavily industrialized corridor along the Mississippi known as “Cancer Alley” have filed a civil rights and religious liberty lawsuit against the parish council that has given a green light to these polluting facilities for decades. Monique Harden of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice joins Host Steve Curwood to explain the history of environmental racism and resistance in “Cancer Alley.”

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Transcript

CURWOOD: The Black residents of the heavily industrialized corridor along the Mississippi in Louisiana known as “Cancer Alley” have been fighting for years to stop new petrochemical plants, but each battle has been a bit of a game of “whack-a-mole”. Now they’re bringing a civil rights and religious liberty case against a local government body that has given a green light to these polluting facilities for decades. The lawsuit alleges that the St. James Parish council has “intentionally chosen to locate over a dozen enormous industrial facilities in the majority Black fourth and fifth districts, while explicitly sparing white residents from the risk of environmental harm.” The suit seeks to enjoin the council from issuing any more industrial permits in black neighborhoods. Monique Harden is the Director of Law and Policy at the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice and joins me now from New Orleans. Welcome back to Living on Earth, Monique!

HARDEN: Hi, Steve, great to be back.

CURWOOD: Our pleasure. Now this case has a unique approach, at least to my eyes, because they’re not selling on the basis of pollution exposure alone, but on the basis of systemic racism and discrimination going back since the first days of slavery on the sugarcane plantations there. What’s the history of what happened there?

HARDEN: Well, this is a case that is novel but sorely needed in communities that have bared the burdens of legacy pollution that date back for generations. In St. James Parish, Black communities have borne the burdens and hazards of toxic pollution raining down on them from industrial facilities that were all approved without their say. This goes back to the 1940s in Jim Crow Louisiana, when Black residents in particular did not have the right to vote. And so issues around land use, zoning, how they would be represented, how decisions would be made around what would be developed in their environs was something that they were denied, brutally, in the South and here in Louisiana and in St. James Parish. So what this lawsuit sets out to do is really to remedy and correct that wrong that continues and persists to this very day.

CURWOOD: Now, in addition to being a civil rights and environmental justice lawsuit, this is also about religious liberty, according to the complaint from the plaintiffs. What’s the basis for bringing the action on the grounds of religious freedom, and what are the laws there?

HARDEN: Well, the basis is that there’s a law protecting the exercise of religious freedom and institutions. And what the facts show is that land use planning sets aside buffer zones to protect Catholic churches and places of worship from industrial development, but not the same for any other religious institution or place of worship in the parish.

CURWOOD: And of course, I gather the bulk of Black people there are not Catholic, they’re Baptist, whereas probably the majority ethnicity of the Catholic churches there are white. How accurate is that perception?

Sugarcane fields in front of the Marathon Garyville refinery in St. John the Baptist Parish, adjacent to St. James Parish, Louisiana. Enslaved African Americans once toiled to grow sugarcane on plantations, and today petrochemical plants are replacing agriculture in the region. (Photo: Jenni Doering)

HARDEN: You will find Black Catholics throughout Louisiana, but the numbers are larger among white residents. More likely than not, it does follow mostly along racial lines, so that it’s more likely that white Catholics would live next to Black Protestants, mostly Baptists, throughout the state.

CURWOOD: What’s the role of the cemeteries along the Mississippi there? The cemeteries that, it’s understood that people who were enslaved working the sugarcane plantations back in the day, are either already under factories or in places that factories want to build.

HARDEN: Or in places where the factories have control over the sites in terms of access to them. That’s also the case here in Cancer Alley. This has only happened, right, because of the total lack of regard for Black people, Black communities, and Black burial places. Cemeteries of deceased Black residents of St. James Parish are not afforded the same protections, as the case for cemeteries where there are, white residents of the parish have been buried. So righting those wrongs is what’s front and center of this lawsuit. You know, you’re talking about places where people who have gone on and passed on, are relatives of folks living today and fighting for the places that they call home. And if you can take away a community cemetery, and you can take away their right to clean air, clean water, clean land, what’s left? What’s left? And so you see residents really fighting for a way of life that has never been protected by their parish government and trying to right that wrong.

CURWOOD: Please give me an example of what the plaintiffs say is discriminatory behavior by the planning boards there in that county when it comes to industrial plants.

HARDEN: It’s real simple. The planning boards do not afford the same protection to Black communities in the parish as they do to white communities in the parish. So in the lawsuit, the plaintiffs discuss the St. James Parish planning Council’s decision in an application that was brought by an industrial company called Wolverine Terminals. This Corporation had sought a land use approval from the St. James Parish Council, where they wanted to build a terminal for crude oil storage in a predominantly white part of St. James Parish, where residents were more than eighty percent white and just about thirteen percent black. That application was denied by the St. James Council, on the grounds that the company did not consider locating in a Black community in the parish.

Petrochemical plants near residential neighborhoods in “Cancer Alley” along the lower Mississippi River in Louisiana. (Photo: Courtesy of Deep South Center for Environmental Justice)

CURWOOD: So just blatant like that, huh?

HARDEN: Yes. You know, stepping into St. James Parish and looking around and driving around the community, it’s, the landscape just exhibits that racial divide in terms of where industrial, you know, heavy polluting industrial facilities are able to locate and operate, in Black communities, and you don’t see them in the white communities. And it’s not to say that white communities should have them too. You know, our position at Deep South Center for Environmental Justice that no community should have it. But what we see in St. James Parish, what this lawsuit points out is that the discrimination is one where it forces all of the hazards and all of the health and safety risks and the denial of a sustainable future for Black communities in the hands of a parish council that makes decisions like this.

CURWOOD: Monique, why have environmental laws, like the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, failed to get results when it comes to environmental justice?

HARDEN: Well, it’s because they do not address the tremendous health concerns that communities, Black communities in St. James Parish, for example, have. Instead, the laws operate in accordance with equipment, devices, modes of processing and operations, that is already in existence within an industrial sector. So that if you own a company in a particular industrial sector that’s regulated under the Clean Air Act, the only thing you have to do is meet the standard of peers within your industrial sector that are now codified in the regulations under the Clean Air Act. So you see how a community’s demand around health and safety are not addressed in that kind of a framework.

CURWOOD: Now, a number of years ago, you won a case blocking a big company called Shintech from setting up a plant there. If the environmental laws like the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act don’t really address this, how are you able to succeed in that case?

HARDEN: Well, the case against Shintech that I brought along with lawyers and law students at Tulane Environmental Law Clinic focused on bringing in something outside of the Clean Air Act for the EPA to consider. And that was the then President Executive Order on Environmental Justice that called on EPA and other federal agencies and departments to prevent racially disproportionate pollution burdens. So our argument was that our state agency had drafted an air permit for the Shintech company in St. James Parish, back in 1996, that not only didn’t comport with the legal requirements under the Clean Air Act, but it also would fail to ensure that the environmental justice called for in the executive order would be followed. And so you know, that landed on the desk of EPA Administrator Cal Browner, who made the right decision in finding that environmental justice is a priority for the agency, also agreeing with us on the numerous errors in how the permit was drafted that did, in fact, even violate those bare basic minimum requirements for that facility. And also doing another thing that was really unprecedented at that time, which was setting the EPA on a course for civil rights enforcement as a way to carry out the obligations of the agency has under the executive order on environmental justice. And so what we did in the Shintech case, in some ways, is similar to what’s happening here in this lawsuit, which is going outside, beyond, those environmental legal requirements, because they really don’t address the health and wellness and sustainability of a community, but instead looking for other support in law and policy.

CURWOOD: Monique, to what extent does the history of not just slavery, but later on Jim Crow, and the inability for many, I think almost all Black people couldn’t vote until the Voting Rights Acts come along in the 60s. To what extent does the lack of the vote by people of color undergird this massive discrimination when it comes to putting polluting sites along the Mississippi?

Monique Harden is the Director of Law and Policy and Community Engagement Program Manager at the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice. (Photo: Courtesy of Deep South Center for Environmental Justice)

HARDEN: It’s really central, Steve, because it was this denial of the right to vote and participation in decision making that affects your life, denied to Black residents across the South under Jim Crow system, that opened the door for oil refineries, gas production, chemical manufacturing, and now plastic production to come into so many places in the southern region where Black communities, Black people were able to settle and found and develop communities, places where hundreds of families could call home. And those places became targets for this kind of industrial development at a time when, of course, the residents didn’t have a voice in even leveling a protest against it, let alone asking questions regarding it.

CURWOOD: So you’ve been involved in this kind of litigation and efforts to address environmental injustice for a number of years. What do you see the odds of this particular lawsuit moving forward, at least getting into the discovery phase where information will have to be revealed by this set of parish officials and planning councils?

HARDEN: I think the plaintiffs and their lawyers have really done a really good job of laying out how this particular parish government’s decisions violate the rights of Black residents in the parish, and looking at the laws that protect those rights under the federal non discrimination laws, federal protections for the exercise of religious freedoms. And so in that way, it really brings together much of what the environmental justice movement is set on, which is protecting the rights of people to enjoy the places that they call home. And you can’t enjoy the place you call home if your parish government is targeting you and bombarding you with one toxic facility after another.

CURWOOD: Monique Harden is the Director of Law and Policy and the Community Engagement Program Manager at the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice. Thank you so much for taking the time with us today.

HARDEN: Thank you for having me.

Links

Read the complaint against the St. James Parish Council

About the EPA’s 1997 Shintech decision citing environmental justice and civil rights

About Monique Harden, Esq.

Listen to Living on Earth’s story about enslaved people buried in Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley”

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THE TRAIN THAT DERAILED NEAR THE Ohio-Pennsylvania border in February 2023 was hauling mixed frozen vegetables. It was hauling malt liquor and semolina flour as well as chemicals used to make plastics. Chemicals like vinyl chloride monomer. Think of vinyl chloride like metaphorical railcars. When coupled end-on-end-on-end, they make up the long-haul train that is polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plastic, which the manifest suggests other cars on the actual ill-fated train were also carrying.

PVC is garden hoses. Is water pipes. Is shower curtains. Is siding and decking and flooring and toys. It is medical tubing and IV bags. And for the audiophiles among you, it is records, also called vinyl, even when sometimes pressed from polystyrene.

Vinyl chloride is a carcinogen. Burning vinyl chloride, like burning PVC plastic, creates the conditions to form even more potent chemicals called dioxins.

Multiple companies make PVC plastics. The PVC on the derailed train was carried in cars tagged ROIX, which in railroad speak means the cars were owned by a company called Shintech. Shintech—“the world’s largest producer of PVC”—is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Japanese firm, Shin-Etsu. In the U.S., it operates PVC plants in Freeport, Texas, and in Addis and Plaquemine, Louisiana.

Multiple companies make vinyl chloride. Norfolk Southern was carrying vinyl chloride in at least two cars traceable (the car ID, OCPX) to OxyVinyls, a division of OxyChem, which is a division of Occidental Petroleum. OxyVinyl’s vinyl chloride plant is in Deer Park, Texas, near the Houston Ship Channel, where a tornado ripped through earlier this year, knocking the plant temporarily offline.

Sometimes vinyl chloride and PVC factories cluster together, says Jim Vallette of Material Research, who has mapped the industry. For example, the companies Olin and Dow each supply vinyl chloride to Shintech’s neighboring Louisiana and Texas PVC plants, Vallette told me.

Other times, the railroad is how vinyl chloride is ferried to distant PVC plants, and then how finished PVC gets to its molders and fabricators.

IT IS UNCLEAR WHAT EXACT ROUTE the East Palestine train was traveling.

Chemical engineers, like train engineers, also speak of routes—the different pathways by which hydrocarbons can be coaxed toward the same destination.

There are multiple routes to making vinyl chloride.

All routes require chlorine.

Chlorine is bleach. Is white linens and white paper. Is disinfectant. Is the WWI-era war gas racing across the fields at Ypres before sinking down into the trenches and the lungs of unsuspecting soldiers.

No other industry uses more chlorine than PVC.

Chlorine is made from brine, which is to say salt, from which the chlorine must be split.

PVC is garden hoses. Is water pipes. Is shower curtains. Is siding and decking and flooring and toys. It is medical tubing and IV bags.

Historically, mercury figured prominently in this process.

Then asbestos.

Now the chlorine industry is pivoting toward using membranes manufactured from a chemical in the per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) family. PFAS is a group of at least 12,000 substances; the better studied of the group have been associated with a number of health effects, including cancers.

Asbestos is a carcinogen with its own signature cancer: mesothelioma.

Mercury is a heavy metal and, in the form of methylmercury, it is teratogenic (meaning it causes birth defects, notably on the developing brain and nervous system, my colleague at the Science and Environmental Health Network, Dr. Ted Schettler, reminded me). It is also a neurotoxicant and a global pollutant, so much so that its industrial use falls under a United Nations treaty: the Minamata Convention on Mercury.

The convention is named for a town and a bay on an island in the south of Japan.

It, too, has a signature disease—Minamata disease—though some who live with it have stated they would rather it be called what it is, which is severe industrial methylmercury poisoning.

The community of Minamata is more readily associated with mercury than with what the mercury was used to make, which are (among other endpoints) the chemicals used to make vinyl chloride and vinyl.

One hundred and forty nations convened in Japan in 2013 to adopt the Minamata Convention. Fifty nations had to sign for it to go into effect.

Japan didn’t ratify the convention until February 2016.

The East Palestine train derailment followed seven years later. Almost to the day.

I haven’t yet explained the different routes to vinyl chloride.

Early process patents were filed in 1912, writes the late historian Morris Kaufman, who began studying the history of PVC production at Imperial College London in the 1960s. German attempts to scale production didn’t yield a commercially viable product, so thirteen years later, the patents were allowed to lapse. A handful of companies picked up the research and development, making PVC’s origins international, diffuse, and difficult to neatly trace, said Kaufman.

In the U.S., Union Carbide, since bought by Dow (which merged with DuPont, reshuffled itself, and reemerged as “the new” Dow), began producing vinyl chloride in 1929 at a petrochemical complex—at the time something entirely new under the sun—along the Kanawha River, a tributary of the Ohio, which is a tributary of the Mississippi, which empties into the Gulf of Mexico.

PVC production commenced the following year in 1930, though it took a while for the plastic to catch on. Union Carbide set up along the Kanawha to take advantage of Appalachian natural gas, which the company had been a front-runner in exploiting. There was already a WWI-era chlorine plant next door.

Scientific research on vinyl chloride toxicity followed immediately thereafter, with papers appearing in the literature in the 1930s, too.

Another route begins from petroleum, which historically is how vinyl chloride has been made along the U.S. Gulf Coast.

A third route to vinyl chloride instead starts from coal.

The East Palestine disaster makes plain just how many communities are enveloped by plastics and have experienced both routine releases and environmental disasters linked to its production. 

BEGINNING IN 1932, THIS IS HOW THE COMPANY that is now Japan’s Chisso Corporation opted to make vinyl chloride at Minamata. The company made carbide from the limestone found just north of town and the coalfields of northern Kyushu. From carbide to acetylene, and acetylene via a mercury catalyst to acetaldehyde, and onward to vinyl chloride and also, in a separate process, to a plasticizer called dioctyl phthalate (DOP for short), which also is used to soften PVC as well as other plastics.

The company also began routing its mercury-laden wastes into Minamata Bay that same year.

The mercury poisoned the water, which poisoned the fish, which poisoned the fisherfolk and their families who ate it. The last in line to be poisoned were the babies born from wombs poisoned with mercury.

“I had a vision of myself trying to swallow Japanese capitalism,” writes Michiko Ishimure, a writer from Minamata often compared to Rachel Carson.

Since the 1960s, she published—to much acclaim—genre-spanning “nonfictional novels” about the disaster. The first volume she titled Kugai jōdo (Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow). For decades, she advocated for the people of Minamata, though “year after year withered and fell off neatly,” she wrote, “like dead leaves or the brain cells of the victims of mercury poisoning.”

The witnessing, the writing, wore on her: all “these highly significant historical moments stuck in my throat.” It is suspected Ishimure suffered nerve damage from mercury as well.

Though officials recognized the first cases of Minamata disease in 1956, it wasn’t until 1968 that the Japanese government went on the record, admitting “that the cause for the disease was the methylmercury from the Chisso factory,” said Timothy George, professor emeritus of history at the University of Rhode Island and author of the book, Minamata: Pollution and the Struggle for Democracy in Postwar Japan.

Chisso already had ceased using mercury in their acetaldehyde process earlier that year.

“The company itself never officially acknowledged responsibility until it lost, in 1973, a lawsuit brought by the patients that ordered it to pay the largest settlement in Japanese legal history up to that time,” he added.

Other court cases followed.

As did, eventually, the Minamata Convention, which includes provisions to phase out the global use of mercury in chlorine, vinyl chloride, and acetaldehyde production.

Read more from Rebecca about our plastic legacy here.

“Incredibly,” says Vallette, “the mercury-acetylene route is still used (and expanding) in the Uyghur region” of northwestern China, where PVC plastics are made using the forced labor of the Uyghur people, many of whom are Muslim.

The U.S. passed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act and now U.S. Customs and Border Protection is banning the import of vinyl flooring from plastics made at these factories.

Still, they “are probably the most polluting plastics plants in the world,” he says. “The PVC plants [there] release more than 50 million tons of carbon dioxide per year, and are continuing to use and release massive amounts of mercury.”

Despite the Minamata Convention.

Says Vallette: these PVC plants “deserve a lot more attention.”

IN 2022, THE UNITED NATIONS GATHERED the global community, this time in Nairobi, Kenya, where overwhelming international support began negotiations toward a legally binding treaty on plastic pollution. The Minamata Convention was held up as a model.

Negotiations opened last fall in Uruguay. They will convene again in Paris this May.

At issue is whether nations will adopt measures to address plastics’ upstream toxic use (in addition to the accumulation of downstream waste).

Plastics experts—myself among them—have called for the treaty to cap production of nonessential plastics; to uphold human rights, including the right to a safe work and home environment; and to push the industry toward safer, more transparent, and less chemically complicated production. Meaning: what to do about mercury, asbestos, PFAS, and the thousands of other already known toxics used in plastics production, and also what to do about monomers like vinyl chloride and plastics like PVC and incidental byproducts like dioxins ought to be on the table.

But the dialogue more often focuses on plastics as a waste problem. If the treaty adopts this narrowed understanding about why so many plastics are problematic, then what has happened in Minamata or East Palestine, then what is happening in China and plastics corridors the world over, won’t seem relevant to a broad instrument that also could be designed to prevent future disasters, future long emergencies in communities living along plastics’ production, transport, and handling routes.

Plastics is a system held up by toxics. By chemicals exemplified by vinyl chloride monomer. As well as by processes that make the intermediates that make the monomers that make the plastics. That system is laid bare when trains linking nodes in plastics’ vast petrochemical network ignite or are, as also happened in Ohio, intentionally burned.

The East Palestine disaster makes plain just how many communities are enveloped by plastics and have experienced both routine releases and environmental disasters linked to its production. When it comes to environmental history, says George, “there is no such thing as the history of just one little place. Every place is connected to every other.”

Regardless of what route the train arrived in East Palestine, in a way it had passed through all the places where vinyl chloride ever has shaped lives and livelihoods. Places I haven’t yet mentioned like, Illiopolis, Illinois, where a PVC plant exploded. Or plants across Italy or in Louisville, Kentucky, where vinyl workers died from angiosarcoma. And in Belgium or Romania, where those who’d climbed down into the vats to clean them were forced into early retirement with fingers too disfigured to function by the rare bone-reabsorbing disease acroosteolysis. Places like Morrisonville and Reveilletown and Mossville, Louisiana, predominantly Black communities, polluted, but ultimately displaced by vinyl production despite communities organizing to protect them.

Places like Minamata.

Read Sandra Steingraber’s account of another PVC disaster here.

“CAN MINAMATA EVER TRULY BE OVER?” writes George. “So many ‘final and complete’ solutions have all turned out to be so incomplete.”

The documentary filmmaker Kazuo Hara says that for the people of Minamata, “the story is far from over.” His documentary, Minamata Mandala, released in 2020, took well over a decade to film. It centers on the story of the people of Minamata, some of whom continue to travel around the globe as kataribe, storytellers. The film is six hours long.

Also in 2020, a major motion picture, called Minamata and based more or less on historical events, premiered in Berlin. It stars Johnny Depp as U.S. photojournalist W. Eugene Smith, who in the 1970s, at the behest of the Minamata community, and alongside Aileen Smith (portrayed by Minami), made pictures for Life magazine to help them make their case. The film’s 2022 U.S. release, however, was overshadowed by Depp’s involvement in a high-profile case of his own. To the detriment of the people living out the long legacy of mercury—and vinyls—in Minamata and beyond.

While searching for the details about Chisso’s production methods, I stumbled on news of the film, and also of its soundtrack, written by the celebrated Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, who has won two Golden Globes, an Oscar, and a Grammy, and passed away from cancer while I was working on this essay.

I’ve been listening to the Minamata soundtrack on repeat as I write; the writing taking on (uncharacteristically for me) a steadiness, like wheels on rails, paragraph after paragraph. It is somber, profound, transporting, a reflection of the scale of the industrial disaster and decades of care work and community activism that also is Minamata.

Recently, the soundtrack was released, I’m not kidding, on vinyl.

The author wishes to thank Timothy George, Bethanie Carney Almroth, Patricia Villarrubia-Gomez, Jim Vallette, and Ted Schettler for their expert research and advice in preparing/reviewing this essay. Additional bibliographic resources have been posted to the author’s website: www.rebecca-altman.com.

Just ahead of this year’s Super Bowl in February, the City of Phoenix, Arizona, published a peculiar press release touting its strategy for waste diversion. Thanks to its relationship with Direct Pack Incorporated, a multinational company that makes and recycles plastic, the city said it would be able to send much of its plastic waste to Mexico for recycling.

“[T]he City of Phoenix stands ready to achieve its goal of hosting the greenest Super Bowl events yet,” the announcement from Phoenix’s public works department said.

The city was referring to a forthcoming Direct Pack facility for recycling plastic items called PET thermoforms — clamshells, berry containers, salad boxes, egg cartons, and similarly shaped containers made from polyethylene terephthalate, one of the seven main kinds of plastic. Direct Pack already has a recycling facility in Guadalajara that it says can recycle tens of thousands of tons of PET thermoforms each year, and it’s been constructing a new one in Mexicali, Mexico, just across the border from California. 

The facility is great news for plastic companies based in the U.S., where industry publications say PET thermoform recycling has remained “a struggle.” These companies face growing scrutiny over skyrocketing plastic pollution, and they have spent decades trying to convince the public that recycling is the answer. Direct Pack says on its website that it can give PET thermoforms new life again and again, turning plastic containers like those thrown away at the Phoenix Super Bowl into a “valuable infinite resource.” 

But environmental advocates in Mexico are less excited about the idea of processing more of what they see as garbage from abroad. “The U.S. shouldn’t send this waste to Mexico,” said Marisa Jacott, director of the Mexican nonprofit Fronteras Comunes. “We have less money, less infrastructure.” Rather than engaging in what she called “waste colonialism,” she urged U.S. companies to stop producing so much plastic in the first place and to stop promoting recycling as a cure-all to the plastic waste crisis. 

Direct Pack’s Mexicali facility is part of a larger plan from the U.S. plastics industry to improve recycling infrastructure for the 1.6 billion pounds of PET thermoforms that the U.S. and Canada produce every year. Unlike the PET bottles used for bottled water, soda, and fruit juice, which are among the easiest plastic products to recycle, PET thermoforms are accepted by just 11 percent of the U.S.’s material recovery facilities, or MRFs — the plants where mixed materials from recycling bins like paper, aluminum, and plastic are sorted into bales for further processing. And even that doesn’t mean that those thermoforms will ultimately be turned into new products; most recyclers are unwilling to buy and reprocess PET thermoforms because it costs more to sort, wash, and recycle them than to make new plastics.

The main North American trade group for PET container recyclers lists only one facility in the U.S. that will accept PET-only bales of plastic for reprocessing. The president of another industry group, the Association of Plastic Recyclers, said last year that PET thermoforms were a low-volume commodity that weren’t worth the costs of sorting and storage.

Given such a bleak landscape, Ornela Garelli, an oceans and plastic campaigner for the nonprofit Greenpeace Mexico, said the promise of thermoform recycling is a “greenwashing strategy” from the plastics industry — a way to justify the continued production of plastics. She said it’s time to stop making so many thermoforms in the first place, not hold out hope that more recycling infrastructure will ever be able to keep up with a growing glut of plastic waste.

Still, U.S. plastic makers are doubling down. A U.S.-based nonprofit called The Recycling Partnership — funded and overseen by plastic and packaging companies, including Coca-Cola and Exxon Mobil — said it plans to fund a number of PET recycling efforts this year, beginning with a first round of grants announced in early January for three companies focused on PET reclamation. 

One of these companies is Direct Pack, whose headquarters are in Azusa, California, just outside Los Angeles. But rather than building out PET thermoform recycling infrastructure stateside, The Recycling Partnership’s grant is being used to help Direct Pack build a new PET recycling facility in Mexicali, set to begin operating this spring. According to The Recycling Partnership, the plant will source thermoforms from across the U.S., process them into a plastic feedstock called “flake,” and send them across the street to an existing Direct Pack thermoform production plant, where they will be converted into new packaging.

Andrew Jolin, Direct Pack’s director of sustainability, told Grist that “the whole process is environmentally sound,” adding that the company has been “embraced by the local community with our competitive pay scale and benefits.” He said concerns about the recyclability of PET thermoforms are “disinformation” propagated by Greenpeace and that Direct Pack plans to open a similar recycling plant in North Carolina by the end of the year.

Critics, however, have raised legal and ethical objections. Jim Puckett, founder and executive director of the U.S.-based nonprofit Basel Action Network, told Grist it was “disgusting” that the City of Phoenix and the companies represented by The Recycling Partnership were touting the Mexicali facility. “Of course it’s wonderful for them, they get to sweep their garbage across the border,” he said.

Puckett said the Mexicali facility could run afoul of an international agreement called the Basel Convention, which regulates the international plastic waste trade. Although the U.S. hasn’t ratified the agreement, Mexico has — meaning it’s illegal for Mexico to import plastic waste from the U.S. unless it’s “almost free from contamination and other types of waste” and “destined for recycling in an environmentally sound manner,” rather than incinerated or dumped. Bales of PET that contain more than 2 percent other types of plastic, paper, metal, food, or other materials are generally regulated under the Basel Convention as “hazardous waste” and are banned from U.S.-Mexico trade.

“It’s really difficult to achieve that level of cleanliness,” Puckett said. In California, MRFs are unable to sort bales of PET beyond an average of about 10 percent contamination — and that’s when they include PET bottles. There’s virtually no data on contamination in thermoform-only bales — since most recyclers in the U.S. won’t buy PET thermoforms, they’re typically not sorted into bales on their own.

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Craig Snedden, Direct Pack’s president, said the company does not check PET bales before they’re exported from the U.S. to the company’s Guadalajara facility, but he’s confident that they contain less than 2 percent contamination, based on data on the weight of PET collected compared to the weight of all the nonrecyclable materials Direct Pack sends to a landfill. Adam Gendell, The Recycling Partnership’s director of materials advancement, said the most common types of contamination are from food, which “doesn’t sink anybody’s ship” or “cause deleterious effects to the natural environment.” 

In response to a detailed list of questions, a spokesperson for the City of Phoenix referred Grist to Direct Pack and highlighted its goal of achieving “zero waste” by 2050.

Environmental groups have also raised concerns that PET thermoform recycling could divert millions of gallons of water from residential use in Mexicali, which was declared to be in a state of emergency drought last summer. Multiple washes are required to remove sticky glues and labels from PET thermoforms, making them significantly more water-intensive to recycle than bottles.

Jolin said the Mexicali facility would “not use a lot of fresh water” — about 800 gallons per day. He said it’s more environmentally friendly to recycle PET thermoforms than to make packages out of other materials like paper, because doing so requires more trees to be harvested. (The U.S. recycling rate for cardboard is greater than 90 percent, compared to 5 percent for plastic.)

Garelli, with Greenpeace Mexico, said supporting a PET thermoform recycling plant in Mexico allows Direct Pack and its funders through The Recycling Partnership to skirt labor regulations that are tougher in the U.S. The minimum wage in Mexicali is about $17 per day — $2.12 an hour, based on an eight-hour workday — compared to $15.50 an hour in California.

“Instead of forcing their own companies to make the transition toward reusability, they are sending all their plastic waste to countries where there are more flexible laws,” she said. “They can pay low salaries to the workers.”

Federal data compiled by the Basel Action Network shows that U.S. plastic waste exports to Latin America have grown by some 90 million pounds per year since 2017, when China stopped accepting it with its “National Sword” policy. “It is not fair for countries — not only Mexico but other Latin American countries — to keep receiving this waste from the U.S.,” Garelli said. 

Editor’s note: Greenpeace is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.

The Oregon Senate on Monday passed a bill that would ban prepared food venders from using foam containers, which take centuries to decompose. 

Senate Bill 543 banning polystyrene takeout containers, also called Styrofoam, a trademarked name, passed  20-9, with bipartisan support. It now goes to the House. 

“Polystyrene is a threat to the health of our communities and our land,” said Sen. Janeen Sollman, D-Hillsboro, a chief sponsor of the bill. “This is a step towards a more sustainable and mindful approach to consumption and a commitment to preserving the health, beauty, and diversity of Oregon for generations to come.”

Polystyrene is a petroleum-based plastic and was commercially produced starting in the 1930s. The nonbiodegradable material has been in the crosshairs of environmentalists for decades. In 1986, the Environmental Protection Agency declared the polystyrene manufacturing process the fifth largest source of hazardous waste. 

They are also a source of litter, and the foam can break down into tiny pieces, posing a hazard to wildlife and polluting waterways.

In areas where the containers are banned, vendors can use other options such as paper cups and cardboard food containers.

The measure, if passed, would go into effect in 2025 and apply to a variety of prepared food vendors, including restaurants, delis and food trucks and carts. Food vendors would face a fine of up to $100 a day for violations. 

The nine senators opposed to the measure included eight Republicans and Sen. Brian Boquist, I-Dallas. 

Sen. Art Robinson, R-Cave Junction, said the bill is another example of a restriction on businesses. 

“Here we go again,” Robinson said in a statement explaining his vote. “Another small requirement. We are now deciding what disposable containers restaurants may use.”

Local ordinances banning polystyrene foam foodware products have passed in Oregon cities, including Portland, Ashland, Eugene, Florence, Lincoln City, Medford, Milwaukie, Newport and Silverton.

Other states have passed laws limiting polystyrene, including Washington, Colorado,  Maine, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Vermont and Virginia.

Fashion wastelands in Africa and the Atacama Desert

A project called Dead White Man’s Clothes, after the name given to clothing exports from the West to Ghana, shows grimly the problem of fashion waste exports.

The UK is the biggest exporter to Ghana. In fact, the UK produces the most clothing waste in Europe. And we’re the second largest used clothing exporter in the world, after the US.

Traders and tailors in Accra’s Kantamanto market work hard to repurpose and sell the clothing that arrives on their shores.

The upcycling and reuse culture in Accra is a great example of what a more sustainable and circular fashion industry could look like.

But the sheer volume – and poorly constructed fast fashion items that aren’t made to last – means a lot of it is impossible to use and upcycle.

So it ends up in landfills, wrapped around the ropes of fishing boats near Accra, and strewn across beaches.

Solomon Noi, the city’s head of waste management, reckons that 40% of the used clothing coming through Accra’s port ends up as garbage. A landfill that was supposed to have a lifespan of 25 years filled up in three.https://t.co/TenL37Mkjm via @BW

— Valérie Boiten (@Valerie_Boiten) November 9, 2022

And Ghana isn’t the only country facing these massive problems. A recent investigation revealed that Europe is dumping 37 million pieces of plastic clothing on Kenya, too.

A 2022 Greenpeace report found massive fashion waste exports pouring into Kenya and Tanzania. In 2019 alone, 185,000 tonnes of second-hand clothes were imported into Kenya. In East Africa this second hand fashion is called “Mitumba”, a Kiswahili word meaning bale or bundle, because it is typically sold to retailers in bales.

30–40% of Mitumba imported to Kenya is of such bad quality that it cannot be sold anymore, meaning in 2019, Kenya had to deal with 150–200 tonnes of fashion and textile waste per day.

And there’s also the Atacama Desert, where piles of clothing waste were documented in 2021:

This is all very embarrassing for the fashion industry. They make too much – and they know it.

But what happens when clothing doesn’t even make it into the hands of buyers? Some of this brand-new, unworn clothing also ends up in places like Ghana.

A lot of it is sent to be burned.

The industry literally burns its own clothes

A lot of unsold stock from companies – knowingly producing far too much to drive prices down – is probably incinerated. But it’s an industry secret how much brand new fashion gets burned.

Burberry shocked the world by accidentally leaking details of its £26-million bonfire of luxury goods in 2018. So it’s no wonder the whole industry has doubled down on hiding their practices.

Why don’t these companies recycle these surplus clothes?

Recycling textiles can be difficult and expensive. Take a look at any clothing label – fibres are often so mixed up, they’ll never be separated and reused in any useful way.  And again, with such large volumes, made with massive amounts of cheap materials, wastage in factories is also high.

Greenpeace’s investigative journalists from Unearthed found that garment waste from Nike, Ralph Lauren, Next, and other leading brands were burned to fuel brick kilns in Cambodia.

Because so much fashion is made from essentially plastic, burning it can be extremely toxic to health. The investigation found that black, choking smoke and noxious fumes exposed bonded workers to toxic chemicals – leading to coughs, colds, flus, nose bleeds and lung inflammation.

Usually such kilns would be fuelled by wood. But fashion waste is so plentiful (thanks to supplies being cheaper in larger quantites) that several hundred tons are being burned in Cambodia every day.

Bottled water is one of the world’s most popular beverages, and its industry is making the most of it. Since the millennium, the world has advanced significantly towards the goal of safe water for all. In 2020, 74 per cent of humanity had access to safe water. This is 10 per cent more than two decades ago. But that still leaves two billion people without access to safe drinking water.

Meanwhile, bottled water corporations exploit surface water and aquifers — typically at very low cost — and sell it for 150 to 1,000 times more than the same unit of municipal tap water. The price is often justified by offering the product as an absolute safe alternative to tap water. But bottled water is not immune to all contamination, considering that it rarely faces the rigorous public health and environmental regulations that public utility tap water does.

In our recently published study, which studied 109 countries, it was concluded that the highly profitable and fast-growing bottled water industry is masking the failure of public systems to supply reliable drinking water for all.

The industry can undermine progress of safe-water projects, mostly in low- and middle-income countries, by distracting development efforts and redirecting attention to a less reliable, less affordable option.

Bottled water industry can disrupt SDGs

The fast-growing bottled water industry also impacts the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) in many ways.

The latest UN University report revealed that the annual sales of the global bottled water market is expected to double to US$500 billion worldwide this decade. This can increase stress in water-depleted areas while contributing to plastic pollution on land and in the oceans.

Growing faster than any other in the food category worldwide, the bottled water market is biggest in the Global South, with the Asia-Pacific, Africa and Latin American and Caribbean regions accounting for 60 per cent of all sales.

But no region is on track to achieve universal access to safe water services, which is one of the SDG 2030 targets. In fact, the industry’s greatest impact seems to be its potential to stunt the progress of nations’ goals to provide its residents with equitable access to affordable drinking water.

Impact on vulnerable nations

In the Global North, bottled water is often perceived to be healthier and tastier than tap water. It is, therefore, more a luxury good than a necessity. Meanwhile, in the Global South, it is the lack or absence of reliable public water supply and water management infrastructure that drives bottled water markets.

Therefore, in many low- and middle-income countries, particularly in the Asia Pacific, rising consumption of bottled water can be seen as a proxy indicator of decades of governments’ failure to deliver on commitments to safe public water systems.

This further widens the global disparity between the billions of people who lack access to reliable water services and the others that enjoy water as a luxury.

In 2016, the annual financing required to achieve a safe drinking water supply throughout the world was estimated to cost US$114 billion, which amounts to less than half of today’s roughly US$270 billion global annual bottled water sales.

Regulating the bottled-water industry

Last year, the World Health Organization estimated that the current rate of progress needs to quadruple to meet the SDGs 2030 target. But this is a colossal challenge considering the competing financial priorities and the prevailing business-as-usual attitude in the water sector.

As the bottled water market grows, it is more important than ever to strengthen legislation that regulates the industry and its water quality standards. Such legislation can impact bottled water quality control, groundwater exploitation, land use, plastic waste management, carbon emissions, finance and transparency obligations, to mention a few.

Our report argues that, with global progress toward this target so far off-track, expansion of the bottled water market essentially works against making headway, or at least slows it down, adversely affecting investments and long-term public water infrastructure.

Some high-level initiatives, like an alliance of Global Investors for Sustainable Development, aim to scale up finance for the SDGs, including water-related ones.

Such initiatives offer the bottled water sector an opportunity to become an active player in this process and help accelerate progress toward reliable water supply, particularly in the Global South.

There’s a common thread linking many of the high-profile chemical spills that have made headlines across the country lately: the oil and gas industry.

Philadelphia residents were on high alert after the Trinseo latex plant 20 miles from the city released at least 8,100 gallons of acrylic polymers into a tributary for the Delaware River on March 24. Those acrylic polymers were made up of compounds known as butyl acrylate, ethyl acrylate, and methyl methacrylate; all are produced from fossil fuels.

Last month, East Palestine, Ohio, faced a Norfolk Southern train derailment with highly volatile toxic chemicals, including butyl acrylate and vinyl chloride — which is also derived from oil. On March 28, 10 barges, including one containing 1,400 metric tons of methanol — yup, you guessed it, made from oil or gas — broke loose in the Ohio River in Kentucky.

Many other incidents don’t make national news: The Guardian reported that the US has averaged a chemical accident every two days so far in 2023. Every year, there’s an average of 202 accidental chemical releases at facilities, according to EPA data.

This adds up to a major threat to water quality. “In the US, chemical exposure probably is the biggest threat to water quality, particularly drinking water quality, whether that is direct chemical exposure from facilities like what happened in Philadelphia or chemical exposure from products,” said Joel Tickner, who is a professor of public health at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and leads the nonprofit Green Chemistry & Commerce Council.

All these events are usually lumped together in the vague category of a chemical spill, but it’s important to get more specific than that. Petrochemicals — as this class of compounds are known — are ubiquitous today, used to make some form of the plastic found in detergents, cosmetics, clothing, packaging, and more. (The Trinseo plant near Philadelphia, for instance, was basically making paint.)

There’s a reason plastics and petrochemicals are in nearly everything. They’re dirt cheap — and useful. The industry has become extremely efficient at converting fossil fuels into sets of materials that are lighter in weight and pliable, making them as adaptable for medical equipment as they are for lip balm, nail polish, clothing, and single-use coffee cups.

But the adaptability comes at a cost. These chemicals can conceivably be produced and transported safely — at least on paper. But the volume of accidents shows how often they aren’t. In 2022, according to federal data, there were more than 20,000 recorded times hazardous materials caused injury, accidents, or death while in transit. “It’s a very risky chain every step of the way,” said Judith Enck, a former regional EPA administrator and president of the advocacy group Beyond Plastics.

Those risks aren’t going away anytime soon. Petrochemical production in the US is booming, derived from the larger boom in US oil and gas supply. And the industry’s broadening footprint means more communities are coming in direct contact with carcinogens and endocrine-disruptors that affect humans and animals in ways scientists still don’t fully understand. Most of the time, people aren’t coming into contact with petrochemicals through train derailments, but in more mundane ways.

From fossil fuels to plastics: The full life cycle of petrochemicals takes a dangerous toll

The final form of plastic you buy at the store may be relatively harmless, but the building blocks it’s made up of are often hazardous to human and animal health. “Oil and gas is the basis of most of our chemistry,” Tickner said. “We built most of our modern chemistry on these seven fairly toxic, challenging chemicals and then you essentially iterate off of those.”

Those seven basic chemicals are methanol, ethylene, propylene, butadiene, benzene, toluene, and xylene, and they can pose a variety of risks. Benzene, for instance, is a known carcinogen. Eventually, benzene may be transformed into something as benign as food packaging, but “that plastic that you have bought has a history somewhere else,” Tickner said. The manufacturing “might go back to a community in Louisiana that is highly exposed to benzene or ethylene oxide or some other material.”

There are more than 11,000 facilities that store, use, or handle hazardous materials in the US, according to the Government Accountability Office. But they tend to be concentrated in a few parts of the country, often in or near communities of color. Louisiana, the Ohio River Valley, and Texas have all seen expansion of petrochemical plants. The map below from Oil and Gas Watch shows the zoomed-out landscape for proposed and operating petrochemical facilities (yellow dots) and their pipelines (yellow lines) across the US:

It’s cheap oil and gas that has helped fuel the rise in chemicals manufacturing. Traditionally, most plastics have come from imported petroleum, but fracking and expanded drilling have given rise to a domestic petrochemicals industry. The 2010s were a decade of historically low natural gas prices, and the cheap fuel made plastics an even more attractive proposition.

These chemicals are produced in a variety of ways, but today the biggest proposed expansion in the US is in ethane cracker plants. These are facilities that use high heat capable of breaking (or “cracking”) the bonds in natural gas’s methane to produce ethane. That ethane is then used to create a huge array of plastics.

One of the products that come from cracking ethylene is vinyl chloride, the same chemical that the derailed train carried in East Palestine. It’s transported as a chilled liquid, but when exposed to the outdoors it becomes a highly explosive gas. The risk of an uncontrolled explosion led responders in East Palestine to vent the vinyl chloride and burn it, producing a black cloud of smoke over the town of 4,700. Residents now worry that the fallout from the smoke will lead to contaminated groundwater in the years to come.

Carnegie Mellon professor of green chemistry Terry Collins noted that the steady rise in petrochemicals nationwide is making it increasingly difficult to keep drinking water safe. Some plastics and petrochemicals mimic hormone molecules found in our bodies and can therefore interrupt growth and development, especially in children. “We’ve got this going on galore,” Collins said.

Everyday exposure to petrochemicals production is a reality for many

As the East Palestine incident highlighted, there’s no completely foolproof way to process and transport these highly flammable and corrosive chemicals. Trains can derail, and pipelines can rupture.

But controlled burns, like the one in East Palestine, happen regularly at petrochemicals plants.

Rachel Meyer, an Ohio River Valley field coordinator for the environmental advocacy group Moms Clean Air Force, has seen just how common it is for a facility to flare its chemicals to avoid any fires or explosions. She lives at the center of fracking operations and petrochemical plants in southwestern Pennsylvania. She is 20 miles from the Norfolk Southern derailment but also a few miles from a giant new plastics plant, Shell’s Monaca facility in Beaver County, Pennsylvania.

The giant Shell Monaca plant is less than six months old and, last month, the plant responded to malfunctioning equipment by flaring gas to avoid explosion. “It was so bright at nighttime,” Meyer said. “It was this reddish orange color. And I could see that on clouds all the way out where I am.” Residents have seen that glow from 17 miles away.

Environmental Integrity Project, a watchdog environmental group, notes the facility has already had 14 records of violations and 34 malfunctions from its construction and operating phase, and the plant already exceeded its annual limits for smog-forming air pollutants within its first few months of operation.

The Shell Monaca plant is one of the largest ethane plants yet to open in the US. Smaller incidents tend to be self-reported by companies, often with a lag time so residents don’t immediately know the reason why the air may smell or there’s an orange nighttime sky.

There are many paths to protecting the public from petrochemicals’ harms. Of course, more work can be done to prevent accidents and promote train safety, while also taking risk management seriously. But safety also starts with rethinking our petrochemicals reliance entirely.

Train derailments, routine flaring, and equipment failures show a far darker side than the oil and gas industry usually lets on. From the industry’s view, plastics and petrochemicals will ensure demand for oil and gas for decades, even as the US transitions away from gasoline-powered transportation.

All these incidents showcase how the impacts from plastics seep into our lives long before they’re tossed into the trash.

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