Can a cancer hotspot be saved from our addiction to plastic?

Interviewees

Shamell Lavigne, founding member Rise St. James

Jo Banner, co-founder The Descendants Project

Joy Banner, co-founder The Descendants Project

Jane Patton, fossil economy campaign manager at the Center for International Environmental Law

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Transcript

Shamell Lavigne: Growing up I thought it was just normal. You know, the chemical plants they would donate to the schools. And then, you know, we were told that that increased our tax revenue. So we were like considered to be like one of the richest parishes in the state of Louisiana at one point.

Shamell Lavigne grew up in a quaint town surrounded by family and nature along the Mississippi River about halfway between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Her family’s owned land there for over five generations. 

Her dad, like many others, had a good salary and benefits thanks to the oil and gas boom in the area. 

Shamell: And so it was just normal. We didn't see anything wrong with it. Only good things we thought. 

During the era of slavery, this region of Louisiana was known as the Sugar Coast for its many sugar plantations. 

A century later, when petrochemical companies moved in, the region was thrown into a completely new era of exploitation. Unbeknownst to its residents. 

Shamell: It wasn't until I went to my junior year going into my senior year of high school, I enrolled in the Super Scholar Excel program at Xavier University. And there were some experts and some attorneys from Tulane who came to our class to speak to us about pollution And that was when I learned the term "Cancer Alley."

As it turned out, this area awash in money from petrochemical companies was also being exposed to massive amounts of carcinogens those companies were putting into the environment. 

She says one of the biggest culprits of turning this region into a cancer hotspot is a hugely profitable byproduct of the fossil fuel industry, one that probably all of us use every day:  plastic. 

Shamell: Our community, I would describe it as a sacrifice zone. We have become the sacrificial lamb for the rest of the world to have single use plastics. 

The world is expected to double or even triple how much plastic it churns out over the next 25 years.

In this episode we'll meet people in Cancer Alley who say their communities are paying a heavy price. But what happens when they start taking a stand against this powerful industry -- and what happens when, against huge odds, they start winning? 

This is Living Planet. I’m Kathleen Schuster. 

The first give away to outsiders that Cancer Alley is steeped in chemicals is the smell.

Shamell: Even when I think I was in college, you know, my friends and I, we had met some friends from another state and they came down and once they crossed the Sunshine Bridge, they was like, "Oh my God, what does that smell?" And it's like, even we were like, we didn't know what they were talking about because we were so used to smelling it, you know? 

But Shamell says her community was living in "filth," but it took many years for that idea to sink in. Even when signs of toxicity began to surface quite literally on her skin. 

Shamell: Like I really didn’t know. When I was in college just about everybody in our house had a rash. And, I can remember having a rash like on my arm here and it's amazing that the scar is now gone. It took some years for a little over 20 years because I was, I it's been some, least two decades since I've been out of college.

But I can remember having a round rash here and I kept going to the doctor. The doctor kept prescribing something for it, but it would not go away, it would itch. And finally I asked my sister Shamika, said, "Hey, you know, what are y'all doing for these rashes that we keep getting?" And she was like, girl, we putting bleach on them. And I was like, bleach? Like what?"

She and her friends put the rash down to contaminated water. More and more storage tanks of crude oil started popping up - close enough to smell.

As the years goes by, Shamell sees people in her community coming down with respiratory illnesses and other serious health problems. 

Then one day in 2018, she gets an alert on her phone. 

Shamell: And so I clicked on it, tuned in. 

The governor was announcing a new petrochemical facility. 

Shamell: And he was literally touting this plant and making it sound like it was gonna be the best thing ever for the parish and for the state. And it was gonna be a $9.4 billion plastics plant. 

The new plastics plant was planned just a few miles from where her mother lived. 

Shamell knew there was a link between the industrial pollution and the health problems she was seeing. So she and her mom, a school teacher, decide to stop the plant. 

They start an organization called “Rise St James” to start campaigning. And they also start showing visitors to Cancer Alley around on what they call "Toxic Tours." 

Shamell: We can literally point out like the streets in the community where there's so many houses down each street that has been affected by cancer. A lot of people who you know, we thought we were going to live for a very long time. They are now gone.

Now, every other house has been impacted by cancer. Sometimes houses, you know, multiple houses in a row have had at least one or two members in that household who have been impacted by cancer.

Shamell has watched the industry grow rapidly over the last 20 years. Today there's a total of about 200 mostly fossil fuel and petrochemical plants along this stretch of land that takes about an hour and half to drive across. 

The region processes around a quarter of the US petrochemical industry's products, which feeds public demand for products like plastic, chemicals, and fertilizers. And for decades these processes have released a variety of toxic pollutants into the surrounding soil, water and air. 

Shamell: And it's to the point now where we've been overburdened and it's hard for us to breathe the air. There are more children with asthma. When I was growing up, they might have had one child that may have had asthma and now, you know, if there's three children in the household, two of the three have asthma.

And we also have adults with asthma. So it's like, we also see an increase in asthma, not just cancer rates. People have bronchitis that just won't go away. And so our quality of life has been diminished. 

Shamell says there's a lot of depression and anxiety in the area. People are afraid to go the doctor. 

Shamell: The folks that are experiencing a lot more illnesses and they might want to move, they can't move because they can't afford it. or they just don't wanna move because this is home.  

The Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality has denied that residents of the area face disproportionate pollution burdens and health impacts. And directly linking pollutants to causing cancers, which can have a long incubation period, is not as straightforward as it sounds. Yet there is plenty of evidence pollution is putting residents at risk. 

The US's Toxic Release Inventory reveals a range of harmful pollutants are released into the air, water and land in Cancer Alley - including those linked to cancer, reproductive issues, birth defects, respiratory issues, and autoimmune disease. 

The area has ranked in the top 5% nationally for cancer risk for decades, and the top 10% for respiratory illness. 

One report found cancer risk near one facility in Cancer Alley to be nearly 50 times the national average. 

Worse still, recent research from Johns Hopkins University in the US suggests the risks have been so far vastly underestimated, finding the overall cancer threat to be 11 times higher than government estimates.

Even though this type of industrial pollution is a problem of the modern world, local activists feel like history is repeating itself.

This area of Louisiana is where, historically, slavery helped sugar plantations thrive, they say Black residents are now being disproportionately affected by petrochemical companies.

Where Shamell grew up, most of the plants built since 1958 are in majority Black neighborhoods.

The UN has called what’s happening in Cancer Alley a case of "environmental racism."

Jo Banner: We've been in this area, my family for over 300 years. So anything that's along the Mississippi River, I think is present in our DNA.  

That’s local activist Jo Banner. Not to be mistaken for her twin sister, Joy Banner. 

Jo says the residents of Cancer Alley are surrounded by pollutants everywhere: in their backyards, on their front porches , in the schools, on the playgrounds. 

Her twin, Joy, says the racial component to this mess is one that also taken a long time to sink in. 

This is Joy: 

Joy Banner: I mean, we were fully into adulthood    when we really understood like, this is racial, you know, this is racism at its heart. And it's unfair to our predominantly black communities in particular.

The twins have spearheaded an environmental justice campaign through their organization The Descendents Project to raise awareness about how Cancer Alley intertwines with the legacy of slavery going back to the time of the sugar plantations there. 

Joy: So we like to lay out in particular as descendants of people that were enslaved at a plantation next to us and near us that the industrial pollution and proliferation that we are surrounded by now is something that started hundreds of years ago. So there is a plantation-to-pollution or a petrochemical pipeline and part of that work is teaching people or explaining how this history of pollution, especially in black communities, is literally built into the structure and built into the economics.  

The name Cancer Alley first made national news in 1987, when a physician quoted in the Washington Post described residents exposed to industrial pollution as having been subject to a "massive human experiment." 

But residents and researchers actually began investigating the health impacts of the pollution here as early as the 1970s. 

Now of course, the US has regulations for pollution, most notably for Cancer Alley, the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts. But Joy believes Cancer Alley is where it is today, because authorities were willing to turn a blind eye to exceeding those limits. 

Joy: The Mississippi River is bigger, it's a large body of water. Even with water pollution restrictions, because you're next to the Mississippi River and you have a government that's looking the other way anyhow, it's really extremely easy for them to come and pollute. So it's basically like Louisiana says, come in, you can pollute our communities.  

She says over the decades, there’s been a revolving door between the chemical plants and politics. 

Joy: You have government who are now working for a plant, have plant people now working in government. So I say industry, I mean, the government is responsible, but government and industry is one in the same, right? And so we have to, I think we hold them responsible.  

But how exactly do these companies get away with so much pollution? There are laws and regulations after all. And companies are required to report their emissions data to the Environmental Protection Agency. 

But not all emissions have to be reported and this self-reporting is often found to underestimate the true pollution picture. Activists have also criticized a lack of repercussions beyond fines for those that exceed their limits. 

A 2021 study of environmental crimes in Louisiana found punishments were rare.

Jane Patton: When these air permits are issued, the government doesn't take into account the cumulative impacts of these facilities. It doesn't say, company one, we are considering an air permit for you, but we've already issued companies A, B, C, and D air permits for it to emit that same chemical all within a five mile stretch of where you wanna build.

So we have to look at you in context of the others. That feels logical to me. That feels obvious, like they would obviously do that. They are not doing that.

Jane Patton campaigns on fossil economy at the Center for International Environmental Law and lives further down the Mississippi in New Orleans. 

Jane: Each facility is considered as if it is a standalone, independent, nothing else next door facility. Which means the people who live alongside these facilities are ingesting, inhaling way more of these pollutants than was imagined by the Clean Air Act permitting process.  

While the shadow of disease has hung over Cancer Alley for decades, she says there are still many unknowns when it comes to what pollutants residents are actually exposed to.

Jane: And we don't even have a good record of what they're inhaling or how that changes based on wind patterns or weather because we don't have enough air monitors. Like I said, we don't have fence line air monitors on the facility. We barely have any air monitors that are managed by our state government.  

Companies are not required to install pollution monitors. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University say there are only one or two in a dense stretch of industrial activity in Cancer Alley -- not nearly enough to really understand what people are breathing. 

And last year Louisiana lawmakers said that private groups could not install low-cost community monitors to allege violations of environmental rules. 

Jane believes these regulatory and monitoring failures continue to compound the risks facing residents. 

Jane: How have we said it is okay to put these people in harm's way? I think that the average mother, for instance, in this country, if you said, I'm gonna plop your child next to a facility that might cause that child to get leukemia at 15, do you wanna live there? That mother's gonna say no, right? That is, no mother is gonna say, yeah, I'll take that risk. But that is what we are asking, not asking, that is what we are forcing on people in Cancer Alley.  

We’ll be right back.

PROMO BREAK

Kathleen: Locals were among the first to raise awareness about the health hazards of living in Cancer Alley. Those calls for environmental justice have only grown over the past few decades. 

The residents are by no means taking this lying down. Cancer Alley has become a hotbed of resistance to petrochemical expansion. But as Jane points out, it's David versus Goliath. 

Jane: The forces that we are up against, think are multifaceted. We are up against some of the largest and most powerful industries in the world. And these industries are used to getting their way. And I don't think they like it when people stand up and say no. We are up against a real entrenched political system that favors these corporations over the people, no matter how bad the impact is. 

But these communities have still managed to be successful. Remember how Shamell and her mom joined the fight against a $9.4 billion plastics plant? 

So far, they’re holding their own. 

Shamell: We've been fighting them since 2018 and we've held them out of St. James. and we're still fighting to keep them out because if that plant was to be built, it would be emitting tons of ethylene oxide into the air and into the water. So we've got to keep them out because if not, with all of the other plants that we have, we really won't be able to breathe at all if that mega plant was to come in. 

The plant would be one of the world's largest plastics facilities and according to the UN would more than double the local cancer risk. The company behind it, Formosa Plastics, is a major Taiwanese plastic producer. Rise St James has been active in organizing marches, attending parish council meetings and encouraging banks to divest from the project. But they have also gone to court. 

Shamell: And we've had to do that through litigation in terms of suing Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality for even permitting Formosa plastics, giving them an air permit, giving them a water permit. Also, having the the US Army Corps of Engineers to prevent them from destroying the wetlands in St. James Parish. And so think that's been like our major victory to date. 

Local groups have also managed to halt a number of other major projects from moving into Cancer Alley. But despite these successes, activists say more work needs to be done with changing minds in the community itself. Joy says the industry has been effective in spreading its message – starting with kids. 

Joy: There is a courting that happens, right? So the plants come in and they give donations to the schools in particular. And then even like the industries will often set up work programs, trade education within the schools themselves.

So now the schools are literally in the, plants are in the schools. dictating, you know, part of the curriculum. And what's happening, I find, is that the young kids, they're being exposed to that kind of messaging and marketing. So that is being, so the impact of the harm of the pollution is being softened.i 

Her twin sister Jo says there's a troubling acceptance of health as the price you pay for a good job. 

Jo: We may think of health is a detriment to maybe wanting to be a part of industry, as a community that's been sacrificed in the sacrifice zone, it's OK sometimes for others to feel like to have damage to their health in order to get a job. And that's just, that's not, I believe this is part of the system that's been drilled into us. So sometimes having those jobs is worth the cost of the health in some people's mind. 

The twins say this builds on a story of economic prosperity the community has been sold for decades which is misleading - the industry no longer brings in the wealth it once did, good jobs largely go to white workers, and alternative industries like tourism have been sidelined. 

Joy again:

Joy: When we think like, wow, we struck the, we won a lottery by having this industry here is absolutely the opposite. We've lost so much to facilitate an industry that's now like just poisoning us and the reason why we're cancer rally.

Plastics pose a risk to our health at every stage of their lifecycle: from the emissions and toxins produced when their manufactured, to the chemicals and microplastics released during their use and disposal. 

But Jo says many people don't connect the dots. 

Jo: I think most people have no awareness of it, even for us in the River Parishes, in Cancer Alley. was not, it's only very recently, I would say the last five or six years, that I understood the connection of plastic harm and the petrochemicals that are coming from these plants and how it ties into the production of plastic.

And my dad literally worked for a petrochemical company and made plastic. So that's because we're so removed from the actual process and what's happening. There's so much greenwashing and there's so many layers between the health impacts and that plastic product so that what we're up against is people who believe it's totally healthy to eat food from plastic.  

What is happening here is part of a much bigger story. The production of new plastic – as opposed to recycled plastic -- has rapidly expanded in the last two decades and the US is among several countries - including China, South Africa, Brazil, Iran and Saudi Arabia - that are rapidly expanding their petrochemical capacity.

And as the world turns away from burning fossil fuels in favor cleaner energy sources, plastics are seen as a lifeline for the oil and gas industry to sustain profits. Ninety-nine percent of single use plastics are derived from fossil fuels.

Back in August Jo flew to Geneva to take part in a UN plastics summit that tried to halt this trend. The talks ultimately failed to reach a deal on limiting plastic production. But while she was there, she found common ground with delegates from the global south also living on the  petrochemical frontlines. 

Jo: In this international space, I'm surprised and shocked how often our communities mirror each other.  

She says some contacts from India came to visit them in Cancer Alley and said it was worse than the conditions they had back home where they also face petrochemical pollution. 

Jo: So like that, was just shocking to see like the prevalence of how, how, how much, how. much we have similar to other communities or countries that are labeled as developing. And here we have it here in the powerhouse that is the United States.

Some activists in Cancer Alley say the biggest fight may be yet to come. 

In January, President Trump signed an executive order dubbed "Unleashing American Energy" to expand fossil fuel production. His administration has also pursued a roll back on environmental protections limiting pollution. 

According to Human Rights Watch there are still around 19 new petrochemical plants planned for Cancer Alley. 

Shamell says, worryingly, this impacts clean air standards that the Biden Administration had strengthened requiring plants to reduce emissions of 6 particular chemicals within two years. This included carcinogenic pollutants such as ethylene oxide and chloroprene found in high levels in Cancer Alley. Now she says plants can easily get an additional two-year waiver. 

Shamell: So that means that's four years we would have to wait for these plants that emit those six chemicals to reduce those emissions. So that means more people are gonna be diagnosed with cancer, more people are gonna have upper respiratory illnesses. And so we're gonna be fighting to restore those rules and those regulations that have been dismantled or deregulated.  

But Shamell says they’re in it for the long haul. Health problems have touched everyone’s lives, including her own. She went through infertility and a miscarriage before having her daughter, who she’s watched grow up battling constant illness at times from air pollution. 

Shamell: What keeps me going is not wanting to see St. James turn into just a cement area where it's just full of industry and it's no longer what I grew up seeing. Not wanting to see my people die premature deaths is one of the main things that keeps me going. 

And so if we are silent, they're thinking that it's okay. It's okay to pollute us, it's okay to poison us, it's okay to just keep building these plants on top of us.

One rainy day last autumn Jo and Joy went searching for their ancestors. 

Joy: For me, that's probably some of the worst weather I've ever been in. It was cold, the rain was a driving rain. 

They entered grounds belonging to a huge petrochemical company in Cancer Alley. Some of these industrial plots still have the names of the plantations that once stood there. 

And the slaves who worked the land lie in unmarked graves – the knowledge of their location has been passed down through the generations. 

It was so muddy their group of activists had to get out of their cars and walk the mile to the grave site. 

Joy worried about the older members of their group who had organized the ceremony. Some were sick with terminal cancer. The twins offered to go back. 

Joy: But they were like, no, I'm going back there and I'm laying flowers to my ancestors. I'm going back. And they went back there soaking wet, soaking wet in order to honor our ancestors.  

For Jo, it was a bitter sweet moment. But also a moment with an eerie echo of the history of that land. 

Jo: As free as we were, we had no freedom that day. We were walking. Someone was monitoring our footsteps the moment we got on the property. We did not have the choice of when we couldn't go and access the burial site. We were under total control and watch. And everything we did was under somebody else's permission.

So it just made me realize how free that we weren't, because our ancestors weren't free, and this is how we had to access them. So yeah, was really, it was a humbling moment. But it also was a humiliating moment to me. I was honored to be there, but I also realized just the humiliation that our ancestors had to go through in order just to honor their loved ones.  

These grounds have now also become part of the fight against petrochemicals. The twins’ organization filed a lawsuit along with another group this summer to be granted access to the grave site. Shamell’s Rise St James has also gotten involved in the fight to protect that land. 

Jo sees parallels between the past and present exploitation of people and the environment, two wrongs coalescing on the banks of the Mississippi. 

Jo: You cannot run from the history and you can't run from exploitation that happened you're talking about an industry the plastic industry whose main root of survival is disposability how quickly can we use something up dispose of it and replace it with something else that's the heart of the slave system how can we use it you dispose of people and then it's gone and just like we're reckoning with the pollution that never leaves, because whenever you produce something, either way, it never leaves the environment. You maybe can't see it. It's still there.  

Jo and Joy worry about their health. But Jo says they can't see themselves ever leaving Cancer Alley. 

Jo: What I know is that I know there has been industrial development. I see it all around me. But I also see how much we've been able to stop and how much we've been able to protect shows that what we are, we are strong, we are descendants and we've been here a very long time and we know this area. That's why I know I plan to stay, live the rest of my life here. I plan to honor my ancestors here and what they fought for.

This episode of Living Planet was produced by Holly Young and edited and soundscaped by me, Kathleen Schuster. Our sound engineer was Jan Winkelmann.

Earlier in the episode, we briefly touched on  Louisiana’s wetlands. As luck would have it we did an episode about restoring those wetlands a few weeks ago, which you can find if you scroll back in our podcast feed. It’s called “Message in a bottle – saving Louisiana’s sinking coastline.”

What did you think of this episode? We’d love to hear from you – send us an email at livingplanet@dw.com or leave a comment on Apple, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you listen to our podcast.

Thanks for listening.