In 1979, Hazel Johnson went door to door through her Chicago neighborhood with one question: how many people in your household have cancer? Nearly every neighbor had an answer. Johnson’s public housing complex had been built on top of a former industrial waste dump. Moreover, more than 50 landfills, a chemical incinerator, steel mills, and abandoned toxic sites, were located within a few miles.
Hazel Johnson founded People for Community Recovery that year. By 1991, she was recognized as the Mother of the Environmental Justice Movement. She died in 2011, but the pattern she documented is still very much alive.
Across the United States, the people who live closest to landfills, waste transfer stations, and trash incinerators are, overwhelmingly, Black, Latino, and low-income. This is not an accident. Decades of research, government data, and community testimony point to the same conclusion: where the waste goes is a choice, and communities with less money and political power have repeatedly been left out of making it.
When everyone shares the burden of environmental damage, the politics of waste will change.
The Numbers Behind the Pattern
The data are hard to dismiss. More than half of all Americans living within about 2 miles of a hazardous waste facility are people of color. In 2022, half of all people living within one mile of a Superfund site (the most contaminated waste sites in the country, requiring federal cleanup) were people of color. Black Americans are 75% more likely than white Americans to live in what researchers call “fenceline communities,” meaning they live close enough to a polluting facility that they experience direct, ongoing exposure to its emissions and waste.
Trash incinerator siting shows the same pattern. Of the 68 remaining incinerators still operating in the United States, 15 of the 20 largest are located in majority Black and Latino communities. They are the oldest and dirtiest waste-burning programs. Their emissions include particulate matter, mercury, dioxins, and lead, which drive higher rates of asthma, respiratory disease, and heart problems in surrounding neighborhoods.
Illegal dumping makes the problem worse in the same communities. In one major American city, all ten neighborhoods with the highest rates of illegally dumped garbage were at least 60% Black or Latino. City wards where people of color make up the majority accounted for 79% of all illegally dumped waste. This is garbage generated elsewhere and transported to places where enforcement is weakest and political pressure is lowest.
Following the Path of Least Resistance
Researchers have a name for what happens in waste facility siting: “the path of least resistance.” A study by the University of Michigan and University of Montana tracked 30 years of data and found that industries seeking sites for hazardous waste operations consistently targeted minority and low-income communities because of politics. Wealthier, predominantly white communities organized and pushed back. “Not in my backyard” pressure worked for them. The facilities moved on to communities with less power to say no.
This unfair distribution of environmental health impacts plays out in specific, documented ways. When a scrapyard closed in a wealthy, predominantly white neighborhood on Chicago’s North Side, the same company got permits to open a new one on the city’s predominantly low-income, Latino Southeast Side. That area now hosts 250 EPA-regulated facilities and has become the only industrial corridor in Chicago zoned for hazardous-waste storage. Residents filed a civil rights complaint alleging the permitting process discriminated against them.
A 2025 study on landfill siting in South Carolina confirmed that Black and Hispanic residents were consistently more likely to live near landfills, and that lower-income households faced the same pattern. Of the two factors, race was the stronger predictor.
Three Communities, One Story
Cancer Alley, Louisiana
An 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge is home to roughly 200 fossil fuel and petrochemical operations, reportedly the largest concentration anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. The people who live along this corridor are predominantly Black, and cancer rates in some communities along the river run up to 47 times higher than the level the EPA considers acceptable.
Sharon Lavigne has lived in St. James Parish her whole life. When a company proposed building a $1.25 billion plastics plant on land her ancestors once farmed, she founded the activist organization Rise St. James. After years of organizing, the plant was stopped. But as another resident told Human Rights Watch in 2024: “We’re dying from inhaling the industries’ pollution. I feel like it’s a death sentence.”
In June 2025, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a lawsuit by Cancer Alley residents could proceed, finding that their claims reflected a “longstanding pattern and practice of racially discriminatory land-use decisions.”
The Ironbound, Newark, New Jersey
Newark’s Ironbound neighborhood is a dense, mostly Latino community boxed in by highways and the Passaic River. Its residents have been fighting the area’s large trash incinerator for nearly four decades.
Community activist Maria Lopez-Nuñez describes the neighborhood as a place “deemed ‘these lives don’t matter as much.'” In June 2025, a state commission approved a fourth gas-fired power plant in the neighborhood, adding to a pollution burden that residents say is already more than the community can bear.
Altgeld Gardens, Chicago, Illinois
In 1987, Hazel Johnson and 16 other protesters blockaded a new hazardous-waste landfill at the edge of Altgeld Gardens, turning away 57 trucks for more than 5 hours. All 17 were arrested.
The action stopped the landfill from opening and pushed the city toward a moratorium on new waste sites. Today, Johnson’s daughter, Cheryl, has taken over leadership of People for Community Recovery. In 2025, the Chicago Sun-Times found that federal rollbacks of EPA environmental justice programs are directly threatening the protections her mother spent her life fighting for.
The Health Costs Nobody Tallies
Living near waste facilities causes measurable harm. Studies link proximity to municipal landfills with low birth weight, bronchitis, and shortness of breath. Long-term exposure to hazardous waste sites is associated with cancer, neurological damage, and developmental delays in children.
These health burdens pile up. Waste facilities tend to push out health-promoting businesses, such as clinics, grocery stores, and parks. A 2025 analysis in Environmental Research found that the negative effects of living near waste infrastructure fell most heavily on lower-income communities of color, with no corresponding economic benefit flowing back to those communities.
Robert Taylor, founder of Concerned Citizens of St. John in Cancer Alley, has described the unbearable human cost of environmental injustice: “Seeing my family and community, especially the young kids, get sick and die is so painful, especially because this is all preventable.”
What’s Holding Back Change
Environmental justice advocates are careful to separate symptoms from causes. Individual facility decisions are symptoms, they argue, but the causes go deeper: zoning laws concentrate industrial uses in low-income areas, permitting processes allow public comments without giving communities real political power, and there has been a steady rollback of federal environmental justice enforcement since early 2025.
One key federal protection has already been weakened. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act prohibits programs that receive federal funding from discriminating on the basis of race. But in August 2024, a federal judge in Louisiana issued a permanent injunction barring the EPA from enforcing its disparate-impact rules under Title VI, which would have allowed communities to challenge a new facility on the grounds that it added to a discriminatory pattern of siting decisions.
In November 2024, the EPA’s independent advisory council recommended requiring cumulative impact assessments before new waste facilities are granted a site approvals, meaning regulators would have to account for all existing pollution in a community before adding more. That recommendation has not been adopted.
The EPA’s EJScreen mapping tool, updated in July 2024 but now hidden after recent EPA decisions, lets anyone enter a ZIP Code to see how much pollution burden their community already carries. The data made the pattern visible, but now the Trump Administration wants America to look away.
What You Can Do
The biggest fixes require policy changes, stronger enforcement, and political will. But individuals have real roles to play, from cutting the total waste that needs to go somewhere to supporting the communities on the front lines.
As an individual or household:
- Reduce waste at the source. Every pound diverted by buying less, repairing more, or choosing durable goods is one less pound that ends up in a landfill or incinerator somewhere. Other articles in this series cover the highest-impact categories: food, flexible plastic packaging, textiles, and electronics.
- Demand the EPA restore access to the EJScreen tool. It shows environmental burden by location. Understanding the pattern in your area is the first step toward acting on it.
- Recycle accurately. When household recycling bins are contaminated with the wrong materials, recyclable material often ends up in landfills and incinerators. Use the Earth911 Recycling Search to find verified drop-off locations for hard-to-recycle items.
At the community and policy level:
- Support extended producer responsibility (EPR) laws in your state. These laws shift waste management costs back to manufacturers, reducing the volume of low-value material flowing into community-level infrastructure. Oregon, Colorado, California, Maine, Minnesota, Maryland, and Washington have active packaging EPR programs.
- Push for cumulative impact standards in permitting decisions. New waste facilities should not be approved without accounting for all the pollution a community already carries.
- Support frontline organizations directly. People for Community Recovery, Rise St. James, Concerned Citizens of St. John, and similar groups do the sustained, ground-level work that makes policy change possible. They need resources.
- Attend public comment periods for waste facility permits in your region. Regulatory agencies are legally required to hold these hearings. Showing up is one of the few moments where community voices have a formal role in the process.