The 1984 Cerrell Report told industry how to site waste plants in low-opposition communities

Evidence

In 1984, the California Waste Management Board commissioned a study on how to site waste incinerators. The report, written by the political consulting firm Cerrell Associates of Los Angeles and entitled Political Difficulties Facing Waste-to-Energy Conversion Plant Siting (popularly known as the Cerrell Report), set out “to assist in selecting a site that offers the least potential of generating public opposition.” The report acknowledged that “since the 1970s, political criteria have become every bit as important in determining the outcome of a project as engineering factors.” The Cerrell Report suggests that companies target small, rural communities whose residents are low income, older people, or people with a high school education or less; communities with a high proportion of Catholic residents; and communities whose residents are engaged in resource extractive industries such as agriculture, mining, and forestry. Ideally, the report states, “officials and companies should look for lower socioeconomic neighborhoods that are also in a heavy industrial area with little, if any, commercial activity.” — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up, 356

Categorization

• SEED: Cerrell’s community profile—small, Catholic, low-education, resource-extractive—is a striking artifact worth an essay on how ‘opposition-proof’ targeting became the industry’s coded siting logic.
• SHARE: A concrete, named consulting artifact that would interest anyone tracking how corporate siting strategy operationalized demographic targeting.
• XREF: connects to: A state-funded consulting report instructed waste companies to target poor, uneducated communities; A state-funded report formally advised siting toxic facilities in poor, rural, minority communities — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental…, 61