Garbage, Power, and Environmental Justice: The Clean Power Plan Rule

Excerpt: “The environmental justice (“EJ”) movement in the United States is intimately tied to the siting of waste disposal facilities like hazardous waste landfills, trash transfer stations, and municipal solid waste incinerators.1 Since watershed moments like the Warren County landfill protests, where an African-American community resisted the waste industry’s targeting tactics to the infamous leaked Cerrell memo in California, the concentration and co-location of waste-related activities in communities of color and low income communities has largely defined the relationship between waste, class, and race.2 Garbage incinerator facilities follow a similar trajectory of other waste-related proposals in that they are often sited in close proximity to communities of color and low-income communities,3 thereby contributing to an already disproportionate environmental burden for these communities.4”

Citation: Ana Isabel Baptista and Kumar Kartik Amarnath, Garbage, Power, and Environmental Justice: The Clean Power Plan Rule, 41 Wm. & Mary Envtl. L. & Pol'y Rev. 403 (2017), https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmelpr/vol41/iss2/4

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