Thanks to Epic Pollution Dump Trump Plans for Black Communities
President Donald Trump is taking an axe to EPA regulations, and Black communities will be the hardest hit, say critics. Under the pretense of “Power[ing] the Great American Comeback,” U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin announced the rollback of 31 federal actions against pollution and factory-released poisons.
So what does an embattled Black neighborhood do when its own government wants to kill it? “Pay attention. Protest. Talk to your local elected officials. Talk to your state representative,” said Anderson. “Just because the federal government is trying to end protection doesn’t mean your local government gets to.”
“Today is the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen. We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion,” said Zeldin. “Alongside … Trump, we are living up to our promises to unleash American energy, lower costs for Americans, revitalize the American auto industry, and work hand-in-hand with our state partners to advance our shared mission.”
Critics say what they’re really unleashing is a volcano of toxins ready to blow the backyards of Black and low-income neighborhoods and towns. A Stanford Medicine study found Black Americans are significantly more likely to die from causes related to air pollution compared to other racial and ethnic groups. It’s a disparity many decades in the making thanks to racist real estate redlining and local government zoning decisions that deliberately placed toxic factory construction in majority-Black communities. Many were too distracted by the complications of poverty to protest outside council meetings during zoning decisions, while others didn’t have the money to donate to the campaigns of politicians who didn’t want to poison them.
In other cases, Black communities are so historically impoverished they welcomed the opportunity to make themselves a “sacrifice zone” for the promise of new jobs. Case and point, Jerry Norwood, mayor of Gloster, Mississippi, was a fan of a facility that turns local pine trees into wood pellets for U.K. consumers, even as Drax Biomass Inc petitions the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality for permission to dump even more toxic particulates onto his town residents.
“Gloster currently has the lowest utility rates in the area … thanks to Drax,” Norwood announced on Facebook. “Last year alone we collected $251,931 in gas, $70,000 in water and $47,892 in sewer (fees) from Drax.”
After already paying more than $2.7 million in combined fines since 2020, Drax owners are applying for permission to be a “major source” polluter to duck any future fines.
For many reasons, polluters are disproportionately putting Black residents in graves. The Congressional Black Caucus Foundation discovered in 2004, per capita, Black Americans are responsible for 20% percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions than white people, yet more than 70% of them live in counties that violate federal air pollution standards. Perhaps not surprisingly, Black people are also almost three times more likely than white people to die or be hospitalized from respiratory diseases like asthma, according to the Environmental Justice and Climate Change Initiative.
Big, dangerous polluting industries like coal plants, in particular, love to cozy up to Black neighborhoods. Black folks only comprise about 13% of the total U.S. population, but almost 80% of them live within 30 miles of a coal-fired plant, according to the NAACP. Now the Trump administration is unchaining these same plants in the name of Trump-o-nomics, with Zeldin announcing the “reconsideration of Mercury and Air Toxics Standards that improperly targeted coal-fired power plants,” apparently with unwanted cleanliness.
The new president is also cool with polluting Black communities’ drinking water by reconsidering “wastewater regulations for coal power plants to help unleash American energy.” In addition, the administration wants to restructure “the Regional Haze Program” it claims “threatened the supply of affordable energy for American families” by demanding state and federal agencies work together to improve visibility in 156 national parks and wilderness areas.
Oh, and those federal limits on particulate matter of 2.5 microns or smaller (PM2.5), the kind from the Drax facility in Gloster? The stuff that pierces the lung membrane and dumps in your bloodstream for added damage? It’s also being “reconsidered” because the Trump administration believes “Particulate Matter National Ambient Air Quality Standards … shut down opportunities for American manufacturing and small businesses,” like Drax—which is neither an American manufacturer nor small. In fact, it employs more than 3,500 people in the UK, US, Canada and Japan.
“And when they say ‘reconsidered,’ what they mean is ‘eliminate’,” said Southern Environmental Law Center attorney Patrick Anderson. “I’m still trying to get my head around all the changes, but the one’s I’ve focused on will disproportionately impact Black and low-income communities.” Anderson said one particularly lethal example of the rollbacks is the administration’s reconsideration of medical sterilizers. Sterilizers may not sound scary, but for ages the U.S. government let companies sterilize and recycle medical equipment with Ethylene Oxide (EtO) and then vent it unfiltered out of factory stacks. Within the last 10 years, however, the EPA figured out EtO was 60 times more toxic than expected, carrying risks of lymphoma, leukemia and breast cancer.
And when we say it was used to sterilize “medical equipment,” we’re not talking about the occasional bloody scalpel or a stack of sticky sample cups. “They used to move whole pallets of equipment into a warehouse and then shut the doors and pump this stuff in and vent it. But these days they don’t do that. They use controls,” Anderson told BGX. “They have to minimize it now, but that’s only because they were required to do it by these federal rules that are now on the chopping block.”
Sterilization Services of Tennessee (SST) was one company releasing ethylene oxide into the Memphis air since the 1970s. That was, until Southern Environmental Law Center attorneys joined the Memphis Community Against Pollution (MCAP) and the Mallory Heights Community Development Corporation and pushed the EPA to regulate the hazard. The company announced it was closing its facility in 2024, but before the doors shut, guess what kind of neighborhood it occupied. Go on, guess.
So what does an embattled Black neighborhood do when its own government wants to kill it? “Pay attention. Protest. Talk to your local elected officials. Talk to your state representative,” said Anderson. “Just because the federal government is trying to end protection doesn’t mean your local government gets to.”
It may come as some comfort that the Trump administration is throwing so much out in such a vastly illegal way many of its hurtful decisions will be difficult to defend in court. It may also help to know Trump and DOGE are cutting so much government staff defending and implementing the rollbacks in court will be difficult. But more and more courts are carbon copies of Trump.
“It’s less encouraging to think of what the (Trump) Supreme Court will do, but the way they’re doing things right now is not well supported,” said Anderson. “You could take any one of these rollbacks and try to make it as justifiable as you can, but it’s still going to be a fight because they’re trying to undo things that the government has already done. If they succeed, though, what they’re trying to do is very scary.”
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