Seeking protections for Cancer Alley residents in plastics treaty

Nairobi, Kenya — Jo Banner, an environmental justice activist in Louisiana, came to the plastics treaty talks in Kenya to try to convince negotiators to put more attention on how plastics pollution impacts vulnerable people.

The co-director of The Descendants Project, Banner took to the stage at a Nov. 12 forum on the sidelines of the talks to urge countries writing the details of the agreement to remember communities like hers, along petrochemical production zones in the Gulf Coast.

"My community has many titles, one of the titles you may have heard of is Cancer Alley," she said. "That is because my area, the area between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, has the highest rate of cancer, the 95th percentile, in the United States."

Banner and others, including New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell, spoke at a forum in Nairobi organized by World Wildlife Fund and Beyond Petrochemicals to look at how the treaty should address climate and health impacts from plastics production, use and disposal.

Cantrell told the audience of treaty delegates that residents of Southeast Louisiana are impacted by air, water and soil pollution from petrochemical plants, and their prevalence has turned the region into the "gas station of the United States."

"Air pollution is at the front, based on these petrochemical facilities that have adorned Southeast Louisiana, putting our people in harm's way," she said. "Health disparities are four times the national average. This is what our people are suffering from."

"These facilities have been built on the backs of our people, in the backyards of communities," Cantrell said. "They are disproportionately African American communities and communities of color."

Groups taking the stage at the event, "Visions for an Ambitious and Just Treaty," have said they want to push countries to prioritize restrictions for toxic chemicals used in plastics, as well as require more disclosure of chemical components in plastic and place limits on resin production. Some like Banner said they want to stop plastic production altogether.

Treaty talks involving diplomats from 170 nations and hundreds of observers are scheduled to run from Nov. 13 to Nov. 19 at United Nations offices in Nairobi. Two more sessions are planned to finish the agreement by late 2024.

One WWF speaker pointed to a recent report her group released that said the lifetime cost of plastic in poorer countries is eight to 10 times more than in higher-income nations, because those poor countries don't have the resources to effectively manage plastic pollution or regulate its production.

"Despite consuming three times less plastic than high income countries, the costs are being felt at least eight times higher for those of us in the low- and middle-income countries," said Alice Ruhweza, senior director of WWF-Africa. "It's very similar to the climate issue. We are feeling it more."

She said one study found that 93 percent of deaths connected to plastic manufacturing occur in low- and middle-income countries, where regulations are weakest.

"This was evidenced in 2017 when the Koshe waste dump in Ethiopia, created to deal with a mountain of single-use plastic, collapsed, killing 72 people and displacing 300," Ruhweza said. News reports said people, including children, died as their makeshift homes inside the landfill were buried under debris.

A speaker from the International Pollutants Elimination Network said his group wants to make negotiators aware of research on toxic chemicals used in plastic products, like flame retardants and bisphenol-A, and how they can be recycled back into new products like children's toys.

Griffins Ochieng, an IPEN steering committee member and program manager at the Centre for Environment, Justice and Development in Nairobi, said he was concerned about the current draft text of the treaty including consideration of minimum recycled content levels for plastic products.

"It concerns me when I see some of the solutions particularly being promoted, the continuing promotion of recycling as a solution into the treaty," he said. "I don't think it's workable."

Banner said the large number of petrochemical plants in communities like hers, St. John the Baptist Parish west of New Orleans, have made them into "sacrifice zones" where public health and environmental burdens fall more heavily.

She said the parish was recently identified as the most climate impacted of 70,000 counties in the United States.

During her speech, she asked others representing fenceline communities around plastics and petrochemical plants to stand up, and she asked diplomats or company representatives in the audience to talk with them.

Banner said she attended the previous two treaty sessions, in Uruguay and Paris, and that's made her familiar with the diplomatic vocabulary regularly tossed about in the talks.

But she added that she hoped negotiators would consider that other words are also going through the minds of her fenceline colleagues.

"We're having these talks and we're using words like zero draft and intercession and brackets and all those terms that are now too dog gone familiar to me," Banner said. "Honestly, I want you to know that these people in their brains are also juggling the terms chemotherapy, dialysis, hospitals, sickness."