Detroit’s incinerator concentrates toxic harm on poor communities of color
Evidence
In Detroit, Michigan, for example, the largest trash incinerator in the world burns 4,000 tons of garbage every day, a process that is converted into energy in the form of electricity. The incinerator costs Detroit residents over 1.1 billion dollars, ravages the local neighborhoods with toxic pollution linked to high asthma rates and other illnesses. … Pollutants resulting from burning trash are linked to cancer, respiratory ailments, skin diseases, and birth defects in disproportionate levels for working class communities and people of color. Today, Detroit has higher rates of respiratory illness than the rest of the State of Michigan. Children living near the incinerator are hospitalized three times more often than the state average for asthma. Those growing up near toxic sites have been shown by neuroscientists to have severe learning disabilities, and shorter life expectancies. Death rates for asthma among children in Detroit as twice the state average (Wasilevich et al., 2008). — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education, 1237
Categorization
- ADDENDUM: A flagship case of environmental racism in an urban classroom context — links the Chavis environmental-racism line to measurable health disparities.
- XREF: Feeds directly into the eco-justice education course thread on environmental racism and land/place as a deployable case study. — connects to: One company sited every toxic waste incinerator in communities of color — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental…, 66; Pollution control captures harm at one site only to relocate it onto minority communities — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 623; Some communities are treated as more expendable under global environmental racism — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 156
Broader Connections
- Some communities are treated as more expendable under global environmental racism
#complicates(0.72) — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 156