The US’ most polluted region is battling the country’s biggest plastics plant

The new Formosa Petrochemical factory would not only worsen pollution in a heavily polluted town, but also contribute considerably to greenhouse emissions

By Oliver Laughland and Emily Holden / The Guardian, WELCOME, Louisiana, and WASHINGTON





Gail LeBoeuf makes an unlikely climate justice campaigner. Although the 67-year-old resident of Gramercy, a small town in southern Louisiana by the banks of the Mississippi River, has been fighting against local pollution for the past few years, she spent most of her career working at an area plastics manufacturer.

“These plants just kept popping up, one after another, built by these billionaires who decided they just want to make money — so they come into these little river parishes and sweep everyone else aside,” she said.

On a marshy roadside, facing a sea of sugarcane fields, she pointed toward the horizon, where the latest polluting plant in this heavily polluted region of the US — known locally as Cancer Alley — is due to be built.

Illustration: Kevin Sheu

Named the Sunshine Project, the planned plastics manufacturing complex, a project of the Taiwan-based Formosa Petrochemical Corp (台塑石化) through its subsidiary FG LA LLC, has become a focal point in the fight against industrial pollution in Saint James parish and the surrounding region.

The Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality in January granted the Sunshine Project a final set of permits, allowing construction of the complex’s 14 separate plants to begin.

Saint James parish neighbors Saint John the Baptist parish, home to the most toxic air in the US. Local campaigners such as LeBoeuf have been saying for years that the cocktail of new pollutants — including the cancer-causing compounds ethylene oxide, styrene and benzene — creates an intolerable risk to local health.

In District 5 of Saint James parish — 26,700 hectares of land — there are eight industrial plants operating, and the new project is to occupy 931 of those hectares.

The Sunshine Project would not only be a major contributor to local toxic pollution, but would also be a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions. The department has permitted Formosa to release an astonishing 13.6 million tonnes of greenhouse gases per year, the equivalent of three-and-a-half coal-fired power stations.

The facility could emit less greenhouse gas than permitted, as the totals in the permit “were generated based on the facility operating at maximum levels, 100 percent of the year,” a Formosa Petrochemical spokeswoman said, without citing a separate figure.

The company would “perform a variety of emissions testing and monitoring activities” at the facility, the spokeswoman said.

The permits mark the project as the single biggest emitter of climate pollution under construction in the US, an analysis of oil and gas industry proposals conducted by the Washington-based advocacy group Environmental Integrity Project showed.

Since 2010, the industry has announced about US$204 billion in spending on 340 new or expanded projects, the American Chemistry Council said.

Many of the projects are to produce plastics — a sector that the research firm IHS Markit forecasts is to expand an average of 3.5 to 4 percent per year through 2035.

This boom in plastics manufacturing is fueled by cheap oil and gas released by hydraulic fracturing, known as fracking.

The fracking sector is planning 157 new or expanded plants and more drilling over the next five years, a report released by the Environmental Integrity Project said.

These projects are to release up to 205.93 million tonnes of additional greenhouse gases by the end of 2025 — a 30 percent increase from the sector’s footprint in 2018.

Oil companies are banking on plastics growth for when oil demand in the transportation industry peaks, said Steven Eric Feit, an attorney for the Center for International Environmental Law’s Climate and Energy Program.

“The story from the oil industry for how they’re going to see growth in the 21st century is plastics — that’s what they’re saying,” Feit said.

Many of the biggest facilities are along the US’ Gulf Coast — with eight of the top 10 by size in Texas or Louisiana. The other two are in the Appalachian region of the eastern US, a region that has been struggling with the coal industry’s decline and toxic legacy.

Like other environmental justice battles in the southern US, the fight to stop Formosa is being fought by a group of local African-American women, such as LeBoeuf and Sharon Lavigne, founder of Rise Saint James.

Sitting in her home in Welcome — less than a kilometer from the planned Sunshine Project — LeBoeuf said that Democratic US presidential hopefuls should be doing more to view the struggle against toxic polluters such as Formosa Petrochemical in the context of the climate crisis.

“The federal government needs to step in on this,” she said. “I think all the candidates for president who are talking about fossil fuels need to be in our corner too.”

However, environmental justice campaigners in Louisiana have begun to realize that they are also part of a global struggle against the climate crisis.

At a Jan. 20 meeting with newly elected Saint James councilman Mason Bland, LeBoeuf and other advocates from the environmental group Rise Saint James persuaded their representative to rescind a series of land-use permits granted to Formosa Petrochemical.

LeBoeuf said that she also asked her local representative to think about Formosa’s direct links to the climate crisis.

“Do you believe in global warming and climate change?” LeBoeuf recalled asking.

“I’m not going to answer that question,” Bland said, according to LaBoeuf.

All seven members of the Saint James parish council, including Bland, were contacted about whether they are concerned about the climate crisis and Formosa Petrochemical’s contribution to it, but none responded.

The discovery of fracking — a method of injecting fluid into the ground at a high pressure to release oil and gas — vastly expanded the supply available to drillers. In turn, oil and gas prices plummeted.

Fracking has also made it cheaper to make plastics, which come from a by-product of the extracted gas.

Experts have said that the rapid boom in plastics production has been overlooked as the lower-emitting gas has allowed the US to phase out coal plants, at a benefit to the environment.

“Industry is saying this is good because we’re replacing coal, but they don’t talk about what else they’re doing with it — which is making plastic and chemicals,” Environmental Integrity Project director of research Courtney Bernhardt said.

A legal complaint filed against Formosa by lawyers representing local residents said that the amount of greenhouse gases released by the plant would be the equivalent of 6.5 percent of Louisiana’s total energy-related emissions based on 2016 standards.

The permits issued by the department skirt the issue of greenhouse gas emissions, saying that there is no reason to block construction of the complex because there is no way to measure precisely how the project’s emissions would affect the surrounding area.

Beyond greenhouse gases, the 157 oil and gas projects planned across the US could emit thousands of tonnes of pollution that contribute to smog and the particle pollution that contributes to asthma and heart attacks. They would also emit sulfur dioxide, which damages the lungs, and nitrogen oxides, which feed fish-killing “dead zones” in waterways.

A new initiative to confront the climate crisis in Louisiana, which faces severe coastal erosion and rising sea levels as a consequence of global heating, was announced last week by Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards, a staunch supporter of the Sunshine Project.

“Louisiana will not just accept or adapt to climate change impacts,” Edwards, a Democrat, said at a news conference in Baton Rouge. “Louisiana will do its part to address climate change.”

The governor has created a climate initiatives task force to reduce emissions among the dominant oil, gas and petrochemical industries in the state, and has committed at least another US$115 million to combatting coastal restoration.

Edwards did not announce any binding emission reduction targets.

The plan is “laughable,” Louisiana Bucket Brigade founding director Anne Rolfes said, adding that the most effective way to combat climate change in the state would be to implement a moratorium on new petrochemical facilities.

“If we’re serious about reducing carbon emissions, let’s move toward halting them,” Rolfes said.

LeBoeuf and other Rise Saint James members had not been contacted about the governor’s new task force and did not expect to be part of the initiative.

On a marshy roadside, facing a sea of sugarcane fields, she pointed toward the horizon, where the latest polluting plant in this heavily polluted region of the US — known locally as Cancer Alley — is due to be built.

As LeBoeuf pointed toward the site on which Formosa plans to begin constructing the Sunshine Project this year, she spoke about media reports that two suspected slave graveyards were found on the land.

Formosa did not inform the community of the archeological discovery. It was only made public following a public records disclosure.

The information has led Rise Saint James to urge the parish council to reconsider its permits, an argument that has thus far gained little traction.

“It’s still a plantation,” said LeBoeuf, who traces her ancestry back through generations of local slaves. “Those people were slaves on the plantation back then. Now we’ll be slaves to an industrial plantation.”