A Louisiana court just revived plans for the country’s biggest plastics plant | If Formosa’s megaproject goes through, it could more than triple cancer risk in parts of St. James Parish.
by newnemo
A Louisiana court just revived plans for the country’s biggest plastics plant | If Formosa’s megaproject goes through, it could more than triple cancer risk in parts of St. James Parish.
by newnemo
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>Plastics manufacturing is a notoriously polluting enterprise that involves combining fossil fuel byproducts with chemicals to produce polymers. When the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality granted Formosa its air permits in 2019, it authorized the plant to release 13.6 million metric tons of greenhouse gases every year, the equivalent of 3.5 coal-fired power plants. The agency also greenlit the release of more than 800 tons per year of toxic air pollution, including chemicals such as benzene and ethylene oxide, which studies have linked to various forms of cancer.
>The investigative newsroom ProPublica used a model developed by the Environmental Protection Agency to estimate the effect these emissions would have on communities in St. James Parish, and found that in the town of Convent on the river’s east bank, hundreds of residents’ exposure to cancer-causing chemicals could double. One mile east in the town of St. James, it could more than triple. The analysis noted that even without Formosa’s plant, residents in some parts of the parish were in the top 1 percentile nationwide in terms of their exposure to cancer-causing industrial air pollution.
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