Official toxics reports framed waste as inevitable, dodging production questions

Evidence

Most crucially, the report solely addressed local residents’ safety. There was only a brief, one-paragraph introduction, outside of the main text, about the politics of toxic waste production. This paragraph baldly stated that toxic waste was an inevitable, unfortunate fact of contemporary life; the only question was how to dispose of it. The document never addressed activists’ demands to limit toxic waste production, and never asked why more capacity for toxics processing was needed when the government was loudly proclaiming that corporations should produce ever-dwindling amounts of toxic waste. — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics, 1410

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Political questions about toxicity get deflected into anxieties about personal consumption choices. — Nina Eliasoph, “Close to home”: The work of avoiding…, 77

Broader Connections

• Political questions about toxicity get deflected into anxieties about personal consumption choices. #expands (0.80) — Nina Eliasoph, “Close to home”, 77