The Race to Stop a Plastics Plant Scores a Crucial Win
Judith Enck & Rebekah Creshkoff | September 23, 2022 | Scientific American
As an old saying goes, you can't fight city hall, meaning government. But the people of St. James Parish, La., did just that—and they won a major court victory against a massive plastics plant supported by the governor, state and local legislators, the business community and local power brokers.
Led by Sharon Lavigne of Rise St. James, a faith-based grassroots organization fighting to reduce pollution in the community, and lawyers at Earthjustice, a national nonprofit environmental law organization, and other community groups led the years long battle. Ultimately, the groups persuaded Louisiana’s 19th Judicial District Court to cancel 14 air pollution permits granted by the state's Department of Environmental Quality that would have allowed Formosa Plastics to build its proposed petrochemical complex. Petrochemicals are in a slew of products, including plastics.
This project would have created the largest plastics plant in the world and subjected the residents of St. James Parish to another 800 tons of hazardous air pollutants every year—on top of the air pollution they already breathe from miles and miles of refineries and other petrochemical facilities that dot the landscape.
This stunning legal decision is just a single case, and the company has promised to appeal. But, as the head of an organization with environmental policy expertise, we believe the win will galvanize equally effective local opposition in other places across the country where similar facilities are being proposed—invariably in low-income communities of color, primarily in Texas, Louisiana and the areas that make up Appalachia.
Meanwhile, the world is already overflowing with single-use plastic, most of which is neither recyclable nor biodegradable. The decision will also prevent additional carbon pollution from being spewed into the atmosphere when the nation urgently needs to slow climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
As investments in renewable energy and electric vehicles cause demand for fossil fuels to decline, the oil and gas industry is turning to plastics to keep making money.
This trend has alarming implications for the climate crisis. Last October, a report from our organization, Beyond Plastics, found that greenhouse gas emissions from plastics production in the United States are on track to outpace domestic coal emissions by 2030. The Formosa project alone would have emitted more than 13.6 million tons of greenhouse gases a year—equivalent to what 3.5 coal-fired power plants would emit in the same year.
But stopping, or at least slowing, Formosa’s project is just part of reducing the overall pollution burden for St. James Parish, which is located along an 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans known as "Cancer Alley." The corridor, in which many low-income people live, houses about 150 petrochemical plants and refineries, and the risk that people of color living nearby will develop cancer over the course of their lifetime is significantly higher than the national average.
According to their permit application, Formosa Plastics’ project would have doubled or even tripled the levels of carcinogens St. James residents breathe. Twelve petrochemical facilities are already within a 10-mile radius of the site where Formosa wants to build, and the new complex would make the concentration of pollution even worse than it is today.
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