Though Scott Pruitt is finally out at the Environmental Protection Agency, his reign of terror isn’t over. In his year-and-a-half on the job, Pruitt repeatedly attempted to roll back and eliminate a number of environmental regulations. His successor, Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist is likely to do much of the same. And, as Vox notes, the changes that Pruitt (and now Wheeler) sought to implement are likely to have a disproportionate impact on people of color and low-income communities. Though Republicans in Congress refuse to believe scientific facts, numerous studies demonstrate both low-income populations and people of color are “more likely to suffer the harms of polluted water, air, and soil.”
So once again poor folks and people of color are put at risk—this time with respect to environmental laws and living in hazardous and toxic environments. Trump’s EPA could care less about this. And in 2017 his administration completely eliminated any funding for the Office of Environmental Justice, which means that the reform must fall to local and state governments. Such an example of this can be found in New York City, where the City Council will vote on Wednesday on legislation that proposes to cap the amount of trash that certain community districts process—specifically focused on neighborhoods in Queens, the Bronx, and North Brooklyn.
With a population of nearly 8.5 million people and millions more who work in the city, New York generates a lot of trash. Specifically, 3.8 million tons of annual residential waste and 4 million tons of commercial garbage each year. The residential trash is disposed of by the City’s Sanitation Department. But the commercial garbage is handled by private firms. Out of 59 community districts, 4 of them (located in in North Brooklyn, the South Bronx, Southeast Queens, and Southeast Brooklyn) handle almost 75 percent of the trash. In other words, the majority of the city’s trash is taken to low-income communities of color for processing. As Priya Mulgaonkar, from the Environmental Justice Alliance notes, this poses a problem for a whole host of reasons. According to Gothamist, Mulgaonkar said that the residents of those communities are a concrete example of environmental racism. She notes that the facilities in these communities where the waste is processed are "truck-intensive, privately operated facilities—many of which are just across the street from parks, schools, and residences." The facilities also pose a pedestrian hazard. In the last eleven years, 33 people have been killed by private garbage trucks in the city.
If the bill passes this week, it will reduce the permitted capacity of waste treatment centers in those 4 community districts that process the majority of the city’s trash by close to 38 percent. It would also mean that no community district would handle more than 10 percent of the waste in the city. It’s unclear how much support this bill has, especially since environmental advocates have been trying to get it passed since 2013. And even if it does pass, there are questions remaining about how much this will actually reduce the long-term impacts of environmental racism. Even if the amount of trash processed in these areas is significantly reduced, which is certainly a start, it doesn’t eliminate the risks for asthma, heart and lung disease and the other kinds of issues that impact people who are exposed to pollutants.
And, of course, it is worth asking the very obvious question of why communities filled with poor people and people of color are overburdened with trash facilities while rich, white folks in Manhattan get clean air. But, of course, we know why this is. It’s the same reason that Donald Trump has hired people to run the EPA who don’t actually care about the environment. It’s because capitalism allows everything to become a commodity—including or especially clean air and water and those who can’t afford it, don’t get it. Trump is a capitalist and his friends are too and in the end they only care about profits for the wealthy and for big businesses. They could care less if poor and black and brown people die from environmental injustice. They don’t care if they die at all. Everything they do is in service of harming the poor and people of color. So, for the foreseeable future, it’s up to local leaders to make a difference. Because, sadly, even though the leadership has changed at the EPA, the mentality is still the same. As Vox so aptly notes: “And while the EPA’s leaders are changing, the agency’s limited willingness to address environmental racism probably won’t move any needles.”