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The air along the Mississippi River in southeast Louisiana doesn’t smell right. It stinks of an industry that prioritizes cheap plastic over human health.
The residents of this 85-mile stretch, known since the 1980s as Cancer Alley, are predominantly black, and according to the EPA’s 2014 National Air Toxics Assessment, their risk of getting cancer from air pollution is 95 percent higher than most Americans’.
Today, they’re also disproportionately dying from the novel coronavirus. At one point in April, St. John the Baptist Parish had the nation’s highest per capita COVID-19 death rate. Despite the fact that African Americans account for only a third of the Louisiana population, they account for 55 percent of COVID-19 deaths.
Roughly 150 petrochemical plants line the bank of the Mississippi between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Relying on intentionally loose zoning, cheap land, and convenient access to a major shipping corridor, the plants turn fossil fuels into various plastic products. Louisiana’s air pollution standards are the loosest that the EPA allows, and a ProPublica investigation found that the state generally “takes companies at their word on emissions.”
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