Critical Environmental Injustice: A Case Study Approach to Understanding Disproportionate Exposure to Toxic Emissions

Environmental justice research has focused on the distribution of environmental inequalities, such as proximity to landfills, across the U.S. and globally.

BACKGROUND

Public health research and environmental health research, specifically, have focused on toxic exposure-encompassing individuals or communities that are disproportionately exposed to contaminants that are harmful or potentially harmful to them. Yet, little research has applied critical environmental justice theory-characterized by the idea that marginalized communities need to be treated as indispensable rather than disposable-to the study of toxic exposure. To fill this gap, the current paper offers a case study approach applying critical environmental justice theory to the study of disproportionate and unequal exposure to toxic contaminants.

METHODS

This case study is of Kettleman City, a rural, unincorporated community in the heart of California's Central Valley (USA). This community experiences the co-location of environmental hazards, including residing at the intersection of two major highways and hosting a class I hazardous-waste landfill, which is one of the few licensed to accept PCBs. PCBs are a contaminant that has been linked with several adverse health outcomes, including cancers and low birthweight. Residents may also experience poor air quality from proximity to the highways.

RESULTS

This case highlights the uneven distribution of pollution and environmental degradation that may be shouldered by the community, along with their experiences of adverse health and social impacts. This analysis reveals the importance of incorporating a critical environmental justice perspective to unpack experiences of not only disproportionate exposure but also disproportionate procedural and recognitional inequality.

CONCLUSIONS

This research highlights the untapped potential of environmental justice to catalyze exposure science in challenging the unequal distribution of contaminants.

Hazardous air pollutant emissions estimates from wildfires in the wildland urban interface

Fires that occur in the wildland urban interface (WUI) often burn structures, vehicles, and their contents in addition to biomass in the natural landscape. Because these fires burn near population centers, their emissions may have a sizeable impact on public health, necessitating a better understanding of criteria and hazardous air pollutants emitted from these fires and how they differ from wildland fires. Previous studies on the toxicity of emissions from the combustion of building materials and vehicles have shown that urban fires may emit numerous toxic species such as hydrogen cyanide, hydrogen fluoride, hydrogen chloride, isocyanates, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), dioxins and furans, and a range of toxic organic compounds (e.g. benzene toluene, xylenes, styrene, and formaldehyde) and metals (e.g. lead, chromium, cadmium, and arsenic). We surveyed the literature to create a compendium of emission factors for species emitted from the combustion of building and vehicle materials and compared them with those from wildland fires. Emission factors for some toxic species like PAH and some organic compounds were several orders of magnitude greater than those from wildfires. We used this emission factor compendium to calculate a bounding estimate of the emissions from several notable WUI fires in the western United States to show that urban fuels may contribute a sizeable portion of the toxic emissions into the atmosphere. However, large gaps remain in our understanding of the fuel composition, fuel consumption, and combustion conditions in WUI fires that constrain our ability to estimate the impact of WUI fires.

The Interactions of Absorptive Capacity, Buffer Inventory, and Toxic Emissions on Firm Value

A significant amount of research has been conducted on the impacts of emissions reduction, absorptive capacity, and buffer inventory on firm performance. According to the resource-based view (RBV), absorptive capacity and buffer inventory are organizational capabilities and resources to create sustainable competitive advantages. Yet, the resource orchestration perspective (ROP) of the RBV emphasizes that firms need to develop a new capability to orchestrate and deploy their existing capabilities and resources. From an organizational learning perspective, firms with the low-level release of toxic chemicals have established a structured system and systematic organizational routines, strengthening their learning capabilities to share and use internal and external information across functional areas for continuous improvements. This study explores and seeks to understand toxic emissions through systematic operational routines as an organizational mechanism. These routines orchestrate and deploy the firm-specific absorptive capacity and buffer inventory to generate a sustainable competitive advantage. We examine the impacts of the absorptive capacity and buffer inventory on firm value in terms of Tobin's Q, respectively. We also explore how such impacts are moderated by toxic emissions. Our results show that the absorptive capacity significantly enhances the market value of firms. However, the relationship between the buffer inventory and firm value is insignificant. Our additional analyses indicate that the impacts of the absorptive capacity and buffer inventory on the firm value are both significantly positive when firms release low toxic chemicals. Our results further suggest that firms can maximize their market value with a high absorptive capacity, high buffer inventory, and low toxic emissions.

and Toxic Emissions from Pulp and Paper Plants: A Geospatial Analysis

Ovarian cancer is the fifth leading cause of female cancer mortality in the U.S. and accounts for five percent of all cancer deaths among women. No environmental risk factors for ovarian cancer have been confirmed. We previously reported that ovarian cancer incidence rates at the state level were significantly correlated with the extent of pulp and paper manufacturing. We evaluated that association using county-level data and advanced geospatial methods. Specifically, we investigated the relationship of spatial patterns of ovarian cancer incidence rates with toxic emissions from pulp and paper facilities using data from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Toxic Release Inventory (TRI). Geospatial analysis identified clusters of counties with high ovarian cancer incidence rates in south-central Iowa, Wisconsin, New York, Pennsylvania, Alabama, and Georgia. A bivariate local indicator of spatial autocorrelation (LISA) analysis confirmed that counties with high ovarian cancer rates were associated with counties with large numbers of pulp and paper mills. Regression analysis of state level data indicated a positive correlation between ovarian cancer and water pollutant emissions. A similar relationship was identified from the analysis of county-level data. These data support a possible role of water-borne pollutants from pulp and paper mills in the etiology of ovarian cancer.