Environmental harms do not fall on everyone equally. A highway, a power plant or a waste dump has to be put somewhere, and the people who live next to it breathe its fumes, hear its noise and live with its runoff. Environmental justice is the idea that environmental burdens and benefits should be shared fairly, and that everyone should have a real say in decisions that affect their environment.

Warren County, 1982

In 1978 a trucking company illegally sprayed oil contaminated with PCBs, toxic industrial chemicals, along about 240 miles of roadside in North Carolina. The state needed somewhere to bury the contaminated soil. It chose a site in Warren County, a rural county with a largely Black and low-income population. Residents objected that the site had been chosen because of who lived there, and doubted that the local soil and groundwater conditions were safe.

In September 1982, as trucks began arriving, residents, civil rights activists and church leaders lay down in the road and marched in protest for weeks. More than 500 people were arrested. The landfill was built anyway, but the protests are widely seen as the birth of the environmental justice movement in the United States, because they joined the methods of the civil rights movement to environmental concerns.

Research and a growing movement

The protests prompted a 1983 study by the U.S. General Accounting Office, which found that three of the four major hazardous waste landfills in the southeastern region it examined were in mostly Black communities. In 1987 the United Church of Christ's Commission for Racial Justice published Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States, which reported that race was the strongest predictor of where commercial hazardous waste facilities were located. The sociologist Robert Bullard's Dumping in Dixie (1990) documented further cases, and in 1991 the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit adopted seventeen Principles of Environmental Justice.

The idea spread worldwide. The 1989 Basel Convention restricts shipments of hazardous waste from richer to poorer countries, after cases of waste being dumped where rules were weak.

Three kinds of justice

• Distributive justice: are burdens and benefits, from pollution to parks, shared fairly?
• Procedural justice: do affected people get accurate information and a real voice in decisions, not just a hearing after the choice is made?
• Recognition: are communities treated with respect, and are their knowledge and ways of life taken seriously?

Debates

Researchers broadly agree that unequal burdens exist but debate several questions.

• Which came first? Were facilities deliberately placed in poor and minority neighborhoods, or did lower property values near facilities later draw lower-income residents? Studies have found evidence for both, and both raise fairness concerns.
• Race or income? Scholars disagree on how much each explains, and the answer varies by place and period.
• Somewhere has to take it. Almost every community objects to hosting unwanted facilities, a reaction known as NIMBY (not in my backyard). If wealthier areas succeed in blocking them, the burden shifts to those with less power. Some propose compensation, fair-share rules or cutting waste at the source.
• Green gentrification. Cleaning up a polluted neighborhood or adding a park can raise rents and push out the very residents it was meant to help. Advocates now often pair improvements with protections for existing residents.
• Costs and jobs. Some residents welcome industrial facilities for the jobs they bring, and stricter rules can raise costs. Respecting a community's own informed choice is part of procedural justice.

Worked example: where should the transfer station go?

Imagine a mid-sized city that needs a new waste transfer station, where garbage trucks unload before waste is hauled to a distant landfill. It will bring around 200 truck trips a day, plus noise and odors. Engineers identify three possible sites:

• Site A, in an industrial area beside a low-income neighborhood that already hosts a power plant and a busy highway. Land is cheap.
• Site B, in a mixed commercial district near a middle-income neighborhood with no major facilities. Land costs more.
• Site C, on the edge of a wealthy suburb, the most expensive and with the best-organized opposition.

Distributive justice asks about cumulative burden. Site A is cheapest, but residents there already face more pollution than anyone else in the city, and adding more deepens an existing inequality. Health data showing high asthma rates near the highway would strengthen the case against A.

Procedural justice asks how the decision is made. Were meetings held at times and places residents could attend, with information in the languages they speak? Was input sought before the choice was made, or only after?

The NIMBY problem shows up at Site C. If the suburb's lawyers block it, the burden slides toward those with less power. A fair-share rule, under which each district takes a turn hosting needed facilities, is one answer.

Other options: choose Site B with strict limits on truck routes and hours; pay community benefits to whichever neighborhood hosts the station; or invest in recycling and composting so less waste needs handling at all.

The debates in this level do not dictate one answer, but they make it harder to choose Site A simply because it is easiest.