Risk and Risk Assessment

PCB container with sign saying caution contains PCBs Minorities in the US and around the globe are subjected to a disproportionally high level of environmental health risks in their neighborhoods and on their jobs.

The environmental justice movement dates to the late 1970s and early 1980s when African Americans in Warren County, North Carolina, protested the placement of a polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) landfill in their community.

Environmental justice combines civil rights with environmental protection to demand a safe, healthy, life-giving environment for everyone. Among the evidence of environmental injustice is the fact that three out of five African-Americans and Hispanics, and nearly half of all Native Americans, Asians, and Pacific Islanders live in communities with one or more uncontrolled toxic waste sites, incinerators, or major landfills, while fewer than 10 percent of all Caucasians live in these areas.

Ward Transformer Company image In 1978, the Ward Transformer Company, a former electrical transformer repair facility, paid Robert Burns, who owned a waste removal business, to illegally dispose of PCB-tainted liquid. Burns did this by dumping it on the side of 240 miles of state roads across 14 counties in rural North Carolina. When the state discovered the pollution, it arranged to open a landfill in the town of Afton in Warren County, a community that was 84-percent African American.

Though the people of Warren County took the state as well as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to court, they lost their battle, and the landfill opened in 1982. Residents next organized a series of protests, backed by national civil rights organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Protesters worried about the contamination of groundwater from the landfill as well as the economic impact (industry might hesitate to locate in a county that was home to a landfill).

Over 400 black and white activists were arrested during these protests, bringing national attention to the Warren County landfill. Though the landfill was not closed, the activists had brought a new environmental and civil rights issue to light: environmental racism.

Environmental Racism

During these protests, Reverend Benjamin Chavis, Jr., coined the term "environmental racism," a phenomenon that was soon empirically proven. Washington, D.C. delegate Walter E. Fauntroy asked the General Accounting Office (GAO) to study the placement of hazardous waste sites in the South. The study revealed that hazardous waste sites were disproportionately located in poor black communities. The Commission for Racial Justice confirmed these findings in 1987.

Environmental Justice

During the 1980s and 1990s, other community activists followed in the steps of Warren County and challenged environmental hazards in their communities. Scholars also began examining the phenomenon of environmental racism, placing it under the larger umbrella of the movement for "environmental justice," which emphasizes the factors of class and ethnicity in addition to race.

United States Environmental Protection Agency logo Environmental justice activists rarely see themselves as environmentalists or as largely fighting an environmental problem, according to sociologist Robert D. Bullard. Environmental justice activists viewed themselves as battling social injustice and used the language of the civil rights movement.

By the 1990s, the federal government had taken note. The EPA created an Office of Environmental Equity in 1992, and President Bill Clinton issued Executive Order 12898 in 1994, which directed federal agencies (like the EPA) to consider the impact of their programs on minority communities. Although its roots were in the American Civil Rights Movement, environmental justice has become a worldwide concern with researchers examining these same issues within other countries. The estimated cost for cleanup has increased from an early EPA estimate of about $5.6M to near $50M.

Watch the following video on the PCB Contamination at the Ward Transformer Plant from the University of North Carolina Superfund Research Program with grants from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

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