There are currently around 100 proposed petrochemical projects in Texas, and nearly all of them have two things in common: not only are they almost all plastics-related, but, if approved, the factories and other facilities would be built in parts of the state already overburdened by the petrochemical industry. And the people who live in those parts of Texas are predominantly Black and Brown.
“In other words,” according to a new report, “Green Light to Pollute in Texas: Proposed Buildout of Petrochemical Facilities Targets Most Vulnerable Communities, Again,” from the Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice, “90% of new petrochemical facilities proposed for Texas are in counties with higher demographic vulnerability in the form of higher percentages of people of color, or higher percentages of people in poverty (or both) than other areas of the state or the nation.”
Race Is the Best Predictor of Where Pollution Goes
Eight of Texas’s 254 counties host the majority of the state’s petrochemical industry, with Jefferson and Harris counties having the highest concentrations. Jefferson County is about a third Black, and Harris County’s 19% represents one of the largest Black populations for a single county in the whole country.
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According to the report, the strongest indicator of where new facilities are proposed is race: 30% of the proposed facilities are in poorer communities, while more than half are planned for communities that have more Black and Brown people than the average American community nationwide.
Environmental Racism Isn’t New in Texas
“For more than three decades, environmental scholars have documented how race and poverty predict where polluting industries place their facilities,” Robert Bullard, the founder of the center who is known as “the father of environmental justice,” said in a statement. “I documented this facility siting pattern in Dumping in Dixie in 1990. Yet, this new petrochemical buildout shows that we are not addressing this injustice. Instead, we are reproducing environmental and health inequity in Texas’s most vulnerable communities, while federal protections erode around them.”
The public health repercussions of all this highly concentrated plastic production and related industry activity are significant: “The findings indicate that 9 of 10 proposed facilities are in fenceline communities where residents already experience higher environmental and health risks from industrial pollution compared with the national average.”
Federal Rollbacks Are Making It Easier to Pollute
Work on the report was begun during the Biden Administration but finished under the Trump presidency. The shift in administrations could be felt in the work itself: the authors were using EJScreen, the Environmental Protection Agency’s environmental justice mapping tool, to analyze the pollution levels, cancer risks, and other information for communities where new facilities were proposed.
After Trump took office, however, EJScreen was shut down. And as the report notes too, President Trump’s executive orders and the administration’s other moves around environmental regulation certainly seem to favor petrochemical companies over the fence line communities they pollute.
The report conclusion is unequivocally clear. The authors write that, “Texas and other states must end decades-long industrial facility siting where economically disadvantaged fenceline communities serve as dumping grounds.”