The Brief: How overproduction, exports and pollution contribute to racism

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Introduction
This report examines how packaging waste intersects with environmental racism, using the failed New York State EPR bill as a case study and expanding to global examples. It shows how waste management practices disproportionately harm communities of colour and low-income populations, both in terms of health impacts and economic inequality.

Key Takeaways

• The defeat of New York Senate Bill 1464 was linked to claims that packaging producer fees would raise food prices for communities of colour, despite evidence that the bill’s opponents had ties to pro-plastic interests.
• Environmental racism places waste facilities and polluting industries disproportionately in minority and low-income neighbourhoods, increasing health risks like asthma, cancer, and reduced property values.
• Similar patterns exist in Europe, where Roma communities are often forced into polluted, unsafe environments with limited job opportunities, sometimes relying on hazardous waste picking for income.
• Global plastic waste exports, especially from the US and other high-income countries to developing nations, exacerbate environmental and public health harms in places with limited waste-management infrastructure.
• Major packaging producers, including Coca-Cola, promote social responsibility targets but continue high levels of plastic production, raising questions about the adequacy of end-of-life waste management efforts.
• The proposed Global Plastics Treaty may restrict waste exports from the Global North to the Global South and aims to improve conditions for informal waste workers.

Conclusion
The evidence suggests that the packaging industry is deeply tied to environmental racism through both domestic waste practices and international plastic exports. While broader systemic change is needed, producers can take responsibility by reducing single-use packaging, improving waste management at the source, and ensuring their actions do not shift environmental burdens to vulnerable communities. Future policy changes, such as the Global Plastics Treaty, could accelerate these responsibilities into enforceable obligations.

Economic disparities between racial groups became a driving factor in New York State’s failure to implement EPR obligations for packaging producers; but packaging waste is already contributing to a reduced quality of life for disadvantaged communities, even beyond the American border. In this edition of the Brief, we examine the concept of environmental racism and discover how the packaging industry contributes to its impacts.

If New York Senate Bill 1464 had passed, it would have mandated packaging producers operating in New York State to register with a packaging reduction organization. Instead, its opponents told the assembly’s Black, Puerto Rican, Hispanic, and Asian American legislative caucus that eco-modulation fees would trickle down into food prices – and that the expense would have a disproportionate impact on communities of colour, since they are more likely to require the services of food assistance programmes.

Undoubtedly, hunger is a racialized problem. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service has revealed that 76.8% of households experiencing food hardship between 2016 and 2021 were headed by a Native American, Pacific Islander, or a Black or Hispanic reference person. Further research suggests that almost 40% of Black and Hispanic families struggled to afford food during the COVID-19 pandemic, making them nearly twice as likely to do so compared to their white counterparts.

Similar patterns emerge in Europe. The OECD outlines how racial discrimination in the workplace, educational institutions, and the housing market can impact a person of colour’s economic circumstances and leave them more at risk of food insecurity; and Black Europeans report ongoing, sometimes increasing, instances of these incidents. In the UK alone, 24% of Black households are said to experience ‘low’ or ‘very low’ food security, as opposed to 10% of white households.

Nevertheless, proponents of the bill were sceptical that its critics were acting in good faith. Religious leaders condemned the “corporate narrative” through which petrochemical industries – already accused of “exploiting the land, air, and health of our communities, especially in areas where toxic facilities like garbage incinerators and petrochemical plants are concerned” – could “use communities of colour as pawns to preserve their bottom lines.”

Similarly, state assembly member Claire Valdez described the tactic as “plainly racist” and an attempt by pro-plastic lobbyists to “continue pushing their product on exploited and under-resourced communities without consequence.”

The NAACP New York State Conference and Consumer Reports also considered any correlation between the proposed legislation and higher prices for consumers to be “misleading” and unsubstantiated.

“If the concern is cost,” they asserted, “we must also consider the indirect costs: asthma hospitalizations, school absences, cognitive impairments, and reduced property values – disproportionately concentrated in the Black, brown, and low-income communities where waste landfills, incinerators, and waste transfer stations are sited.”

These counterarguments touch on the concept of environmental racism. Civil rights leader Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis Jr. first defined the term as “racial discrimination in the deliberated targeting of ethnic and minority communities for exposure to toxic and hazardous waste sites and facilities, coupled with the systematic exclusion of minorities in environmental policy making, enforcement, and remediation.”

To this day, Black people in the United States are 75% more likely to live in fenceline communities, i.e. neighbourhoods directly exposed to the polluting impact of an industrial facility. People of colour and low-income residents form 79% of the communities living alongside America’s municipal solid waste incinerators, leaving them exposed to the release of carcinogenic chemicals and heavy metals when plastic waste is burned.

“Pollution and the risk of disaster are assigned to black and brown communities through generations of discrimination and political neglect,” staff writer Vann R. Newkirk II told The Atlantic, asserting that people of colour constitute over half of the communities living close to hazardous waste. “As Jim Crow laws created racial segregation, they also reinforced an environmental system that still disadvantages minorities.

“The Jim Crow laws are dead and gone, but the fact that people of colour are still more likely to die from environmental causes is no accident.”

Nor is this a uniquely American problem. Research by the European Environmental Bureau highlights the frequency with which Roma communities, for example, face eviction to make way for other building projects. Especially in Central and Eastern Europe, they are pushed into segregated settlements on the edges of cities, towns, or villages, oftentimes to areas impacted by the environmental fallout of ‘dirty’ industries, waste dumps, and landfills.

Reportedly, the residents of four settlements located around the Pata Rât landfill, not far from Cluj-Napoca in Romania, are predominantly Roma. Due to contaminated soil and groundwater and noxious smoke from burning waste, inhabitants are known to suffer from asthma, bronchitis, high blood pressure, heart and stomach issues, and infections of the ears, eyes, and skin.

Another Romani settlement in Vel’ka Ida, Slovakia, lives beside a factory belonging to US Steel Košice. To compensate for poor housing conditions, residents burn PVC bottles and wood for heat, generating indoor air pollution and raising significant health risks.

Exclusion from other job opportunities has also pushed some inhabitants of Roma neighbourhoods near Pata Rât and Fakulteta in Sofia, Bulgaria, to take up waste picking as a profession. Working on landfill sites for extended periods leaves these individuals still more vulnerable to waste-related hazards, including (but not limited to) lacerations from sharp objects, respiratory conditions from inhaling dust and gases, and dermatological and gastrointestinal impacts.

As the Bureau points out, injustices like these violate the EU’s commitments to the provisions for environmental justice laid out in the Aarhus Convention, as well as the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Yet one might question the explicit links between such a broad socio-political matter and the packaging industry, in particular.

Alongside the vast amounts of packaging waste contributing to landfill-related dangers, many of the biggest generators of plastic pollution have also set themselves targets related to social responsibility. The Coca-Cola Company, for one, is considered a major contributor to branded plastic waste around the world, and is projected to use 4.1 million metric tons of plastic by 2030.

At the same time, it has set various targets to prevent its waste from leaking into rivers and oceans, provide safe drinking water in vulnerable communities, improve the livelihoods of informal waste workers, and solve recycling challenges in Least Developed Nations and Small Island Developing States, all by investing in new solutions and service delivery models.

The latter target is especially significant as Coca-Cola Europacific Partners, one of the major bottling companies behind Coca-Cola products, undergoes an investigation; UN Special Rapporteur on Toxics & Human Rights Marcos Orellana has accused the company of worsening plastic pollution in Samoa by replacing reusable glass bottles with single-use plastics, despite the nation’s limited recycling infrastructure.

For any notorious producer of plastic waste, throwing money at end-of-life treatment may not be enough to tackle the roots of the plastic waste crisis: overproduction and the environmental impacts of the production process itself, such as gas emissions and toxic chemical leakages.

Nor is the issue only at a brand, company, or even national level. While the European Union has prohibited exports of plastic waste to non-OECD countries (and this is to say nothing of ongoing and illegal shipments of plastic waste), the United States is still a major exporter. China and Hong Kong were once the primary recipients of American plastic waste, but China’s ban on plastic waste imports as of January 2018 has redirected exports to South and Southeast Asia.

Naturally, the influx of plastic waste from other countries on top of one’s own – especially when developing countries may lack the necessary infrastructure to process it all – has environmental implications. Processing facilities are forced to shut down when the surrounding air, soil and water supply become contaminated, and the oversupply of plastic is often incinerated, landfilled or dumped.

As Break Free From Plastic adds, developed countries sometimes frame their exports as donations or supply for recycling; yet findings suggest that the quality of waste kept and traded within the EU is much higher than the waste sent elsewhere.

“The practice of exporting waste from higher-income countries to lower-income countries who are ill-equipped to handle this waste is a form of environmental racism,” explains Gaia, a non-profit seeking to phase out the practice of waste incineration. “It places the burden of plastic and toxic waste on the environment, communities, and informal waste sector predominantly in the Global South.”

Environmental racism is bigger than the packaging industry alone, and packaging producers cannot solve it singlehandedly; but they can take an international approach to their waste management plans, not just their sales. This necessity is coming to the fore as negotiations for a Global Plastics Treaty consider a ban on the Global North exporting goods to the Global South, as well as seeking to improve livelihoods in the informal waste sector.

Nevertheless, Gaia sums up the ultimate takeaway: “Exporting countries and companies must take responsibility for their own plastic problem, not export their pollution elsewhere. Ultimately, the responsibility for the pollution created by the export of plastic waste to the Global South rests with companies and manufacturers who continue to rely on single-use, throwaway packaging for their products, despite the devastating impacts.”

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