At AGU’s Annual Meeting 2024, activist Sharon Lavigne spoke about living in Louisiana, in what is commonly known as “Cancer Alley.” The 85-mile stretch along the Mississippi River is home to more than 200 industrial facilities, including the Denka Performance Elastomer plant, which uses chloroprene to manufacture synthetic rubber for products such as automotive parts, adhesives, and construction materials.
The U.S. EPA and the Justice Department sued Denka in 2023, requiring that the company “immediately reduce its chloroprene emissions to levels that no longer cause or contribute to unacceptably high cancer risks within the communities surrounding the Facility.”
As reported in the New York Times and the Washington Post, the Trump administration now plans to drop the lawsuit.
The EPA classifies chloroprene as a “likely carcinogen,” which indicates there is strong evidence it causes cancer in humans. Exposure to the chemical is also known to affect the nervous, cardiac, respiratory, and gastrointestinal systems.
Lavigne, the founder of the environmental justice grassroots organization RISE St. James, spoke about friends and family members with cancer and community members facing a range of other health problems.
“Women become pregnant, they have miscarriages,” she said. “Children [who] go outside to play, will come back in the house with rashes. They have a lot of respiratory problems.”
According to the EPA lawsuit, air quality monitors near the Denka facility measured average chloroprene concentrations up to 14 times higher than the limit for what a person may safely breathe over the course of a 70-year lifetime.
Most communities in the area are predominately Black. A 2019 ProPublica analysis found that the air quality problems were especially acute in predominantly Black and low-income communities. A 2022 complaint filed by the EPA to Louisiana state regulators also alleged that Black communitas faced disproportionate impacts.
“This is a massive injustice,” Lavigne said in her AGU24 keynote. “How would you like it if your community was called ‘Cancer Alley?’”
—Emily Dieckman (@emfurd) , Associate Editor
This news article is included in Eos’s collection of Research and Development updates.
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