When Zero Waste is Environmental Racism

- by Kaya Ban­ton, Chester Envi­ron­men­tal Justice

My name is Kaya Ban­ton and I have been a res­i­dent of Chester, Penn­syl­va­nia all of my life.  Chester is a small city right out­side of Philadel­phia known as one of the worst cas­es of envi­ron­men­tal racism.

There are a num­ber of pol­lut­ing facil­i­ties in and sur­round­ing Chester. The most famous is Cov­an­ta, the nation’s largest waste incin­er­a­tor, burn­ing 3,510 tons of trash per day. Though Cov­an­ta is the largest incin­er­a­tor in the coun­try, they have the fewest pol­lu­tion con­trols of any incin­er­a­tor in the nation. With­in a mile of Cov­an­ta, 80% of the pop­u­la­tion is black. Only 1.5% of waste being burned at Cov­an­ta comes from Chester. The rest comes from wealthy sub­ur­ban areas of Delaware Coun­ty, Philadel­phia, and New York.

Cov­an­ta is the largest pol­luter in Chester and one of the largest in all of east­ern Penn­syl­va­nia.  Due to the pol­lu­tants from Cov­an­ta and oth­er indus­tries, many peo­ple in Chester have can­cer, asth­ma, and oth­er hor­rif­ic dis­eases. I know entire fam­i­lies that have asth­ma or can­cer. Both my moth­er and my lit­tle sis­ter devel­oped chron­ic asth­ma after mov­ing to Chester. The child­hood asth­ma hos­pi­tal­iza­tion rate in Chester is three times the state average.

With research and orga­niz­ing sup­port from Ener­gy Jus­tice Net­work last sum­mer, com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers went door to door last year and packed city hall twice, win­ning a unan­i­mous vote of the plan­ning com­mis­sion, rec­om­mend­ing that city coun­cil shoot down plans for the rail box build­ing to receive New York City’s steel trash con­tain­ers. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, city coun­cil vot­ed in favor of Cov­an­ta because they did not want to get sued. Cov­an­ta was per­mit­ted to bring New York’s trash by rail, which will put them at full capac­i­ty. A big con­cern from the coun­cil was the amount of trash trucks com­ing through the city. Cov­an­ta said that since the trash will be com­ing by rail, the truck traf­fic will be decreased major­ly, but even though res­i­dents made it clear that the trash con­tain­ers will be tak­en through Chester by train to Wilm­ing­ton, Delaware then back into Chester by truck. This will not decrease truck traf­fic, but will only increase pol­lu­tion by adding train traffic.

I did some research and found out that New York’s zero waste plan is actu­al­ly a “zero waste to land­fill” plan that locked in 20 to 30 years of burn­ing waste in Chester, mak­ing the impacts of my city invis­i­ble while New York gets the ben­e­fit of look­ing green. I was incred­i­bly con­fused as to how New York City envi­ron­men­tal jus­tice groups could cel­e­brate the announce­ment of a zero waste plan that allowed waste to be burned in Chester. We give tox­ic tours of our com­mu­ni­ty upon request for those want­i­ng to see what we expe­ri­ence on a dai­ly basis. 

We invite any­one, espe­cial­ly those from Philadel­phia and New York, to con­tact us for a tour.