"The worst case of environmental racism I've ever seen," said Charles Lee, chair of the Environmental Protection Agency's environmental justice advisory committee. Lee, who has been active in environmental justice issues for over 17 years, was talking about the city of Chester, Pennsylvania.
Just 15 miles southwest of Philadelphia, Chester is home to 43,000 residents and one of the largest collections of waste facilities in the country. Sixty-five percent of Chester residents are African-American, as are 95 percent of residents in the neighborhoods closest to the facilities. The poverty rate lies at 25 percent, three times the national average.
The fourth largest garbage-burning incinerator in the nation is directly across the street from residential houses in Chester's west end. The incinerator was originally operated by Westinghouse, but was turned over to American Ref-Fuel in early 1997. Over half of the waste burned there is from out of state and comes from New York, New Jersey, Maryland and Delaware, as well as from all over Pennsylvania.
Though the plant has had several air emissions and odor violations, few penalties have been assessed by the state. In 1993, a highly radioactive pellet of cesium-137, part of the monitoring equipment that is supposed to monitor the plant for radiation, was lost. The community wasn't notified until many months after the fact. The pellet was either vaporized in the incinerator or melted down in the steel plant of one of Westinghouse's contractors. Now, it's either in the air as ash or is part of the metal consumer products manufactured by Lukens Steel Company. No fines were assessed.
Literally next door to the incinerator lies the largest infectious and chemotherapeutic medical waste autoclave in the nation, Thermal Pure Systems. Currently shut down and recently sold, Thermal Pure brought in about three times the amount of medical waste produced in Pennsylvania. Waste was trucked in, sterilized and shipped back out to a landfill near Harrisburg. While operating, it wasn't unusual to find medical waste lying in the grass outside the boundaries of the plant where children are free to play.
In July 1995, Thermal Pure let 33 truck-loads of medical waste sit, unrefrigerated, in the baking sun for four days during a plant shutdown. Legally, Thermal Pure is only allowed to leave waste in such conditions for 24 hours. Also against regulations, the company failed to notify the state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) of the shutdown, and when residents notified DEP, Thermal Pure officials claimed the trucks could not be moved because of the potential health hazard.
A stone's throw away from the Thermal Pure plant lies the DELCORA sewage treatment facility. DELCORA treats about 90 percent of the sewage from Delaware County, which accounts for 20 percent of its capacity. The other 80 percent comes from local industries in Chester, like the Sunoco and British Petroleum (now Tosco) refineries that span the western horizon and from Scott Paper and Witco Chemical. This highly toxic industrial sludge is burned in DELCORA's sludge incinerator, releasing many pollutants, including high levels of arsenic, found by the EPA to be at unsafe levels in the community. Sludge from three other county sewage plants is also burned in DELCORA's incinerator.
As if this weren't enough, Chester is also home to many other chemical companies, hospital incinerators, trash transfer stations and hazardous waste treatment facilities. Just east of the city lies PECO Energy's Eddystone coal plant. On the west side lie the Marcus Hook oil refineries and more chemical companies.
In recent years, two companies have proposed to bring contaminated soil (mostly petroleum and lead-laden soil from leaky underground gas storage tanks) into Chester. Soil Remediation Services (SRS) and Cherokee Environmental Group planned to treat 900 and 960 tons of soil per day, respectively, the first burning the soil and releasing the pollution into Chester's air, and the second using a bio-remediation technology. Thankfully, SRS's air pollution permit expired in November 1996, effectively killing the project unless SRS reapplies.
Due to their close proximity to each other, one might think that the two largest plants in Chester (American Ref-Fuel and Thermal Pure) were part of the same company. In a way, they are. The citizens group Chester Residents Concerned for Quality Living (CRCQL) figured out that there is one company connected to a string of facilities bringing waste to Chester. Careful research uncovered that the land under the two plants, as well as the LCA Leasing trash transfer station, a rock crushing plant and the proposed SRS soil burner is owned by the Pittsburgh-based investment firm, Russell, Rea and Zappala (RR&Z). RR&Z's corporate officers, Andrew Russell and Donald Rea, serve as executive officers of the various facilities. Charles Zappala's older brother, Stephen Zappala, is a Supreme Court justice in Pennsylvania, which came in handy when Chester residents took Thermal Pure to court for accepting over 10 times the legally allowable amount of medical waste (which DEP had okayed). When citizens won in a lower court, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court used an archaic law called King's Bench Rule to overturn the lower court's ruling, allowing the facility to run again.
So does all of this constitute racism? Is it just a matter of classism, where poor communities tend to end up with most of society's waste?
Many studies have shown that waste facilities (particularly hazardous and nuclear waste facilities) tend to be located in communities of color, above and beyond class considerations. When factoring out the economic class of a community, race is still shown to be a significant factor. Middle class communities of color will end up with more waste facilities than poor white communities do.
The response to CRCQL has highlighted the racist undertones. Its office has been broken into twice. Once the walls inside were magic-markered with graffiti, including "KKK." Threats have been left on the group's answering machine. Activists routinely find their tires slashed.
When American Ref-Fuel took over the operations of the municipal waste incinerator, many experienced and local black workers were fired or demoted while white employees from the corporation's other plants in New Jersey and New York were bussed in to staff the facility. One black person who had worked at the plant for six years was told he wasn't qualified for the job. Thirty employees have filed legal complaints.
In one protest where Chester residents physically blocked waste trucks from entering the waste complex, a protester was hit by a truck. It wasn't the regular truck driver who hit the woman, as he refused to drive past the people and turned his truck around. It was the president of the trucking company, Steven Ogborne, who got into the truck and drove it back to the plant, speeding through a line of protesters. Ogborne Waste Removal, a local waste company with recycling operations in Chester, is now pursuing an expansion of its operations in order to bring construction and demolition wastes into the city.
Theoretically, Ogborne's expansion is illegal under Chester's zoning ordinance (the first of its kind in the nation) banning industrial facilities from doing business in Chester unless they prove they will not create a net increase in pollution. Ogborne's plans clearly violate this ordinance, yet the DEP is considering granting a permit anyway. Similarly, Soil Remediation Services' plant (to be built on the RR&Z trash complex) was permitted by the DEP in 1995, even though the permit violated the ordinance as well.
Fed up with the DEP's complicity with industry and lack of enforcement in Chester, CRCQL sued the state in May 1996 for environmental racism under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Since the DEP receives money from the federal EPA, it "shall not use criteria or methods of administering its program which have the effect of subjecting individuals to discrimination because of their race, color, national origin or sex." The lawsuit contends that the state discriminated against the black community when DEP did not consider the racial makeup of Chester or the number of existing facilities when permitting the city's fifth waste treatment plant. This is the first lawsuit of its kind. Two previous suits in Michigan and in North Carolina fought single facilities, rather than a group of them.
The lawsuit, while still in the courts, has pressured DEP to prove that it isn't systematically approving any waste facility targeted for Chester. In October 1997, DEP denied a permit to Cherokee for its proposed contaminated soil bioremediation plant. This was the first time that DEP denied a pollution permit to a corporation targeting Chester. The official reasons for the denial relied heavily on a corporate non-compliance history exposed by citizen activists.
On December 30, 1997, a federal appeals court upheld the environmental racism suit (previously dismissed in a lower court) and backed the Chester residents' assertions that they do not have to prove intentional discrimination was at play. Given the green light, the lawsuit against the state will proceed, and only a discriminatory effect on the part of the agency needs to be shown. This serves as a precedent-setting legal victory for communities throughout the entire nation.
On average, since CRCQL's inception, one new polluter per year has proposed a plant in Chester. CRCQL's 1997 defeat of a proposed pet crematorium, combined with the defeat of both proposed soil remediation plants, represents three defeated facilities in the span of a year. 1997 also brought the aforementioned legal victory and a settlement with the DELCORA sludge plant. The DELCORA settlement requires extensive plant improvements and also will fund a new children's lead poisoning prevention program in the community. Despite this banner year of victories, the community must still fight the newly proposed expansion of the Ogborne plant and plans by the American Ref-Fuel incinerator to expand its waste storage capacity and burn more hazardous types of waste.
In February 1996, students from Delaware County's Swarthmore College held a conference about environmental racism in Chester. Close to 60 students from 15 universities spanning five states attended. By the end of the weekend, the Campus Coalition Concerning Chester or "C-4" was born. C-4 members have brought protests to the headquarters of the RR&Z firm in Pittsburgh, to the DEP and state capital on Earth Day '96, and to the Delaware State Solid Waste Authority (which sends most of its waste to the American Ref-Fuel plant in Chester). C-4 has helped Chester residents with research, computer and technical support, lobbying for environmental justice legislation, door-to-door canvassing in Chester and increased campus awareness. Schools that send garbage or medical waste to Chester are focusing on campus waste prevention and recycling.
Students at Drexel University have done an excellent documentary on Chester called "Laid to Waste - A Chester community fights for its future," which aired on PBS. It has been helpful in getting African-American and anti-racism groups involved in this issue. For information on obtaining the video or on how you can become involved in the Chester campaign or the Student Environmental Action Coalition (SEAC) from which it grew, contact:
Chester Residents Concerned for Quality Living, 2731 W. 3rd St., Chester, PA 19013; (215) 752-1202; catalyst@envirolink.org; http://www.penweb.org/chester/