Environmental movements and campaigns against waste infrastructure in the United States

Abstract

Campaigns against waste infrastructure in the US emerged in the 1970s against a background of increasing public anxiety about the impacts of high-tech industrialism upon the environment and human health. Independently of major environmental NGOs, and unlike earlier anti-nuclear campaigns, which also involved grassroots protests, waste campaigners quickly became networked and raised new issues of environmental justice. Initially focused upon landfills and hazardous waste, the environmental justice movement took up and amplified local protests against waste incineration. Independently of popular protest, changes in public policy and the economics of the waste industry also contributed to the unpopularity of waste incineration, and recycling regained appeal. Campaigns against waste infrastructure have contributed to the broadening of the US environmental movement as well as to ecological modernisation.

Keywords:

• grassroots environmental mobilisation
• waste facilities
• waste incineration
• recycling
• environmental justice

Acknowledgements

We thank Robert Brulle and David Schlosberg for comments on earlier drafts.

Notes

1. This and other studies that claimed to present evidence of the disproportionate siting of waste facilities in neighbourhoods populated by ethnic minorities were subsequently challenged on methodological grounds, and their implications have not always been considered benign (see, e.g., Foreman 1998). But see also Allen et al. (2001) who concluded that people of colour did indeed suffer disproportionately from environmental ills.

2. In fact, Atlas (2001b) found that, allowing for the seriousness of the risks concerned, the poor and people of colour were not more likely to be exposed to possible harm from the transport, processing or disposal of hazardous wastes; the large facilities which treated the largest amounts of the most hazardous waste were, if anything, more often close to white than non-white populations.