'We are suffering for everybody else's comfort' "And if you don't have a voice, enough people don't support you, you're wasting your time." "We live in a poor community with no voice," Williams said. "You have the trash-to-steam place that they literally fought in Pennsauken not to have in that area, so it winds up in Camden," added Sheppard's sister Valerie Baylor. He said the neighborhood continues to get the most pollution because it is "the area of least resistance." They say their neighbors mount less resistance in part because they tend to rent their homes, rather than owning them.Ĭamden resident Edward Sheppard grew up in Waterfront South, and his mother still lives there.
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Waterfront South residents have seen this phenomenon firsthand. "There's a reason they go to Chester, there's a reason they go to Camden, because they've mapped this out and figured it out already." "You don't see them trying to build these kinds of facilities on the Main Line, just outside of Philadelphia," Ewall said. The Delaware Valley Resource Recovery Facility sits in Chester, where 83 percent of residents are people of color and nearly a third live below the poverty line. The Cerrell Associates report has become the playbook for polluting industries, Ewall said, adding that the largest trash incinerator in the country is located in a majority Black community outside Philadelphia. "They might as well put a target on the back of those communities." "Many of them line up with communities of color," Ewall said. While it didn't name people of color explicitly, it listed demographic groups that overlap heavily with Black and Latino communities, such as people who are Catholic and those with an education level of high school or below. The company produced a report outlining which demographic groups were least likely to resist these facilities in their communities.
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In 1984, the California Waste Management Board commissioned public relations firm Cerrell Associates to figure out how to overcome community opposition to trash incinerators. The inequitable placement of polluting facilities has historical roots, Ewall added. there are much more serious concentrations in communities of color." "When you look at the biggest of them, the most polluting of them, the ones with the weakest enforcement and the most violations, the clustering of facilities. "When we looked at over 10,000 dirty energy and waste facilities in our database at once, we found that race is more of a factor than class," Ewall said. He's been working to shut down trash incinerators in the Delaware Valley for 30 years. They just wouldn't allow it."Įnergy Justice Network Executive Director Mike Ewall agrees. "It wouldn't even exist in the poorest white community, period. "None of this would exist in Cherry Hill," Jones said.
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"They put all this dump in Waterfront South where the poor people at, 'cause they didn't want it there," Williams said.īut experts say it's about more than poverty, blaming environmental racism for the disproportionate pollution of neighborhoods like Waterfront South. Nearly two thirds of Black residents and more than half of Latino residents live in these areas, compared to less than a quarter of white residents. It's no coincidence that Williams and her neighbors bear the brunt of the region's pollution: Across the tri-state metro area, people of color are 2.4 times as likely as white residents to live in areas with the highest respiratory risk from air pollution, the 6abc data analysis found. Pollution flows to the 'area of least resistance' "Down there, it's beautiful," Williams said. But in Waterfront South - which is 94 percent nonwhite and has a median income of $23,520 - they've been left behind. The city has prioritized cleaning up the entertainment district and the area around Rutgers University, Williams and her neighbors explained. Just a couple of miles away in downtown Camden, the air is cleaner and the neighborhood has been revitalized. "They are inordinately affected, more so than the rest of the city, because they are the epicenter of it," said Roy Jones, local activist and founder of the National Institute of Healthy Human Spaces.