Formosa Plastics: Opponents of Louisiana plastics plant celebrate order revoking permits
Source: Courthouse News
Opponents of Louisiana plastics plant celebrate order revoking permits
A ruling revoking air permits issued to Formosa Plastics cites environmental racism in a stretch of former agricultural land along the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge known as “Cancer Alley.”
SABRINA CANFIELD / September 15, 2022
BATON ROUGE, La. (CN) — Environmentalists and residents of a small, mostly Black community in Louisiana’s "Cancer Alley" are celebrating what they consider a “nail in the coffin” for Formosa Plastics after a judge threw out air permits the Taiwanese company needs to build a massive plastics complex there.
Formosa’s proposed Welcome, Louisiana, site sits one mile from an elementary school and would sprawl over 2,400 acres of once-agricultural land to include 10 chemical manufacturing plants and numerous support facilities. It would be one of the largest plastics facilities in the world and its operations would double to triple the levels of cancer-causing pollutants in the air.
“Remarkably, the Black residents of Welcome are descendants of men and women who were kidnapped from Africa; who survived the Middle Passage; who were transported to a foreign land; and, then sold on auction blocks and enslaved. Their ancestors worked the land with the hope and dream of passing down productive agricultural untainted land along the Mississippi to their families,” Judge Trudy White of East Baton Rouge Parish Court wrote Wednesday in a searing 34-page ruling in which she granted environmental groups' request to revoke air permits they say Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality issued in error.
Under the permits revoked in the ruling, more than 800 tons of toxic pollution would have been allowed from the plants, deepening an already pervasive environmental racism issue and posing a major threat to the health of an already vulnerable community.
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Read more: https://www.courthousenews.com/opponents-of-louisiana-plastics-plant-celebrate-order-revoking-permits/
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Related: Formosa Ruling
