Researchers Found Texas’ Chemical Plant Expansion Disproportionately Affects Poor, POC Communities

One form of systemic racism that often goes overlooked — or outright denied by white conservative America, like literally all forms of systemic racism — is environmental racism.

Recently, researchers for the Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice at Texas Southern University in Houston found that about 90% of industrial facilities in the state of Texas are located in counties with higher concentrations of people of color and families in poverty than statewide averages. The researchers came to this conclusion after analyzing the demographic data in areas where nearly 100 facilities are located, and they also “found that nearly half of those proposed industrial sites—petrochemicals plants for manufacturing plastics, coastal export terminals, refineries and other facilities—were already above the 90th percentile for pollution exposure under the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Toxics Release Inventory, a measurement of harmful industrial emissions,” according to Inside Climate News.

“Texas and other states must end decades-long industrial facility siting where economically disadvantaged fenceline communities serve as dumping grounds,” the report concluded.

“The process of the dumping, the siting, has not changed over these 45 years that I’ve been studying this,” Robert Bullard, the center’s director and lead author of the report, said in a recent interview. “America is segregated, and so is pollution.”

From Inside Climate News:

Planned projects reviewed in the Bullard Center’s latest work, “Green Light to Pollute in Texas,“ cluster primarily around the state’s existing refinery hubs on the Gulf Coast, such as Port Arthur, the Houston Ship Channel, Freeport and Corpus Christi. Nearly half are located near neighborhoods that already face among the highest levels of toxic air pollution in the country, the report said.

These petrochemical complexes have grown rapidly in the last decade, fueled by abundant oil and gas from the fracking boom in the oilfields of Texas and beyond. Plastics industries dominated that growth. Plastics producers in Texas last year sold $61.5 billion in materials and employed 54,000 people, more than any other state, according to a recent report by the American Chemistry Council, an industry group.

The Bullard Center considered 114 projects related to oil and gas in Texas proposed at 89 different locations as of February 2024, including coastal export terminals, refineries and seawater desalination plants that would supply water for petrochemical production. 

Plastics projects dominated the list. Most are expansions of existing complexes. Companies in Texas have proposed five new ethylene “crackers,” units that break natural gas into the building blocks of plastics. 

Units to produce polyethylene—the most common type of plastic used in bottles and bags—are proposed by Dow and Chevron Phillips Chemical near Freeport, by Baystar near Houston, by Motiva Enterprises and Chevron Phillips Chemical near Port Arthur and by Equistar Chemicals near Corpus Christi. Formosa Plastics plans several new units at its sprawling complex in the town of Point Comfort, including a reactor to make PVC plastic, used in piping, plumbing and construction materials.

Ross Eisenberg, president of America’s Plastic Makers, predictably sees things differently than Bullard and his team of researchers.

“Plastics are essential to modern life, powering our economy,” Eisenberg said in a statement, responding to the report.  “Plastics manufacturing means good jobs, strong wages, and sustained investment in America’s future.”

Bullard countered that claim, saying those “good jobs” and “strong wages” tend to go to people who live outside of the communities these industrial plants are located in.

“Industries say they are providing jobs and increased tax base. But it’s just the opposite for the communities on the fencelines,” he said. “They have higher poverty rates, higher unemployment rates.”

But even if that weren’t the case, we seem to be somewhat putting the cart before the horse here. After all, we’re talking about whether or not the poor people and people of color affected by these facilities are getting jobs or not, and we haven’t even gotten down to the bottom of why the facilities are almost exclusively placed in poor and largely non-white communities in the first place. It’s almost as if industry people are trying to gloss over the racism they don’t want to talk about in favor of pissing on Black and brown people and telling them it’s rain.

Earlier this year, we reported that the NAACP announced file a lawsuit against Elon Musk over the Tesla CEO’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, because a supercomputer facility owned by the company is located near predominantly Black communities in Memphis, ignoring the communities’ concerns of the pollution it might cause. Musk’s company responded pretty much the same way Eisenberg has, by claiming the xAI facility was “already boosting the city’s economy by investing billions of dollars in the supercomputer facility, paying millions in local taxes and creating hundreds of jobs,” according to the Associated Press. It’s worth noting that this year, Memphis received an “F” grade for ozone pollution from the American Lung Association, a grade the city has received every year since at least 2019.

Again, they’re not denying that these facilities are being placed in lower-income minority neighborhoods, and they’re offering no explanations as to why, but they’re promising the people in those communities prosperity. At the same time, their own interests are clearly prioritized.

Capitalists are putting profits before people, and they’re being really clear, albeit unintentionally, about which people they care about the least. That’s what appears to be going on in Texas, Memphis, and anywhere else these practices are happening. This is what racism and classism on a systemic level look like, and it needs to be stopped.

SEE ALSO:

10 Modern-Day Examples Of Environmental Racism

How Racist Policies Around Climate Affect Black People

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