Environmental Justice in Hazardous Waste Clean-ups

There are hundreds of hazardous waste sites and dangerous landfills polluting clean water and in need of clean-up all over Georgia. Georgia’s  Hazardous Waste Trust Fund  and  Solid Waste Trust Fund  collect fees for clean-ups of these industrial and commercial sites, and closed and abandoned landfills. Many of these sites are included on the Georgia’s Environmental Protection Division’s  Hazardous Site Inventory , which is a list of state-level ‘superfund’ sites. This inventory helps inform decision-making about funding efforts to clean up hazardous waste sites, but in its current state it is not supportive of environmental justice efforts. 

Environmental justice requires environmental outcomes to be fair and equitable to all people, regardless of race, color, national origin, income, or any other demographic factor. It is imperative that decision-makers consider these demographic and socioeconomic factors in order to give nuance to decisions and help preserve environmental justice efforts. The Georgia Water Coalition and its members are dedicated to this goal, and are determined to make sure that the Hazardous Waste Fund and the Solid Waste Trust Funds are given to the communities that are at the greatest risk of water pollution from these sites.

In order to accomplish these goals, a map tool was developed to help identify communities that are most at-risk. The tool aims to marry the current criteria for identifying the most hazardous sites with the demographic criteria identified by the federal government's Environmental Justice 40 initiative.

Superfund sites are hazardous waste sites that are empowered to be cleaned by the  Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA)  of 1980. Under CERCLA, sites are inspected and placed on the National Priorities List (NPL) based on their potential to cause environmental damage. The Georgia HSI identifies these sites, as well as several other hazardous waste sites, and operates similarly by providing information about potential environmental risk to people funding hazardous waste clean-ups. Sites are also classified here as either I, II, III, IV, or V. A site's classification describes the potential of a site to receive clean-up efforts.

There are many risks associated with hazardous waste clean-up sites and landfills including destruction of aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems, increased risk of wildfires in affected areas, acute and chronic toxicity exposure in humans, and groundwater contamination that can lead to major health complications in humans ( EPA ). Lists like the HSI and NPL are extremely important, as they provide up-to-date information about the risks associated with different sites as well as the status of clean-up efforts.

One of the largest concerns associated with hazardous waste sites is the pollution of Georgia’s groundwater supply and rivers, so it is imperative that the mapping tool provides information about the status of these hazardous sites in addition to the location of Georgia’s prominent groundwater sources. The following map shows Georgia's river basins outlined in blue and hazardous waste sites identified by the HSI as diamonds of five different colors, which represent the five different classifications of sites designated by the HSI.

Environmental issues are extremely complex, and the degree of environmental damage that a place experiences can be impacted by many things. One major consideration that has been historically overlooked is the role that demographic and socioeconomic factors play in making some places more vulnerable to environmental damage than others. When putting environmental justice at the forefront of an issue it is important to keep these factors at the center of the discussion.

The EPA created a mapping tool to address this very concern:  EJScreen .  The EJScreen presents a set of seven socioeconomic indicators to assess environmental justice including: the percentage of people of color, the percentage of low-income people, the unemployment rate linguistic isolation, less high school education prevalence, individuals under 5 years old, and individuals over 64 years old.  Additionally, the EJScreen also includes a demographic index, which is the average of a tract’s share of people of color and low-income populations, and a supplemental demographic index, which is the average of the other five aforementioned indicators (unemployment rate, linguistic isolation, etc.).  This information allows for spatial analysis of potentially threatened groups.

In this map, the EJScreen demographic index is displayed as a percentile. Displaying the data as a  percentile  helps the viewer rapidly compare census blocks on a standardized scale. Rather than showing the demographic index for a census tract alone, the value for that census tract is compared to the national average. The resulting spatial data shows areas that are the most disadvantaged compared to the rest of the country.

While the EJ Screen’s socioeconomic indicators and demographic information are helpful, it lacks a cumulative and representative assessment of other situational factors that put communities at risk.  To construct a more holistic map, the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool ( CEJST ) classifies census tracts nationwide as disadvantaged or not disadvantaged.  These classifications are determined based on if a census tract is “(1) at or above the threshold for one or more environmental, climate, or other burdens, and (2) at or above the threshold for an associated socioeconomic burden.”  The featured burdens the CEJST considers are climate change, energy, health, housing, legacy pollution, transportation, water and wastewater, and workforce development.  These categories are determined by whether they clear additional thresholds.  For example, the CEJST classifies a census tract as having an energy burden if it is at or above the 90th percentile for energy cost or PM2.5 in the air and is at or above the 65th percentile for low income.  Including supplemental demographic features makes it possible to analyze pervasive and overlapping socioeconomic and environmental challenges in Georgia, and easily identify communities in need of assistance. 

The final mapping tool presented here marries all of these dynamics together. The location of hazardous waste sites and river basins give information about the status of environmental threat posed by each site. EJSCREEN demographic variables and CEJST burden indicators were all taken into account when creating the Environmental Justice Index displayed on the following map. Rather than classifying a census tract as either disadvantaged or not, the eight factors and sub-factors used to create the CEJST were all accounted for in this index. If a census tract reached the CEJST burden threshold in any category, it was counted in the total score, which would be anywhere from 0-8, depending on how many factors met the burden threshold. Additionally, the non-white population percentage from each census tract was added, and provided an additional value between 0 and 1 to each score, in order to account for explicit racial burden and bias that may not be accounted for in the categories of the CEJST. The resulting map layer gives a more descriptive idea of to which degree each census tract is burdened by environmental justice concerns.

The current EJ Index was created with the intention to distribute money from Georgia's Hazardous Waste and Solid Waste Trust Funds to the communities that are in the most need. In order to identify these communities, the census tracts that were identified as having the highest scores (>1.84) were isolated in a separate map layer.

Additionally, the hazardous waste sites that were identified in the 2023 Hazardous Site Inventory were placed on a map to be compared to the top-scoring census tracts. This gives a clear picture of which hazardous sites are eligible to receive trust-fund money and where they are in relation to census tracts that experience high levels of environmental justice burden.

All the layers listed and described in this StoryMap are important to give context to the resulting Environmental Justice Index. If you are interested in exploring the map layers with their full functionality, we encourage you to visit the instant application. This application allows you to toggle map layers on and off and compare our EJ index to those that have been created before.

The instant application can be found here:  https://ksugis.maps.arcgis.com/apps/instant/basic/index.html?appid=b72cb9504535471e8e91424841a3d1e3 

We are always interested in improving and encourage viewers to leave feedback whenever they feel compelled to do so. Leave your feedback on the map here:  https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeNAZudc6du4hVFnHmbr6oWMbBK18n3XJ4gz2nre6VU8iYumA/viewform