For decades, Formosa Plastics Group, a Taiwanese conglomerate, has pushed to build a giant petrochemical complex in southeast Louisiana. In the 1990s, after fierce resident opposition, Formosa withdrew its bid to build a plant in Wallace, a historically Black hamlet in St. John the Baptist Parish.

In 2018, the company set its sights 18 miles upriver, in the historically Black community of Welcome, in neighboring St. James Parish.

Formosa envisions an enormous, $9.4 billion industrial complex, known as the Sunshine Project, that will encompass 14 petrochemical plants and bring $500 million in local spending to St. James Parish. If built, it would be one of the largest plastic complexes of its kind in the world.

But residents say that the projected economic gain would be offset, if not overtaken, by the harm that the complex would cause, through toxic air emissions. A new air modeling report found that Formosa Plastics’ emissions would violate federal air pollution protections.

St. James Parish sits in the middle of “Cancer Alley,” an 85-mile corridor along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans that houses the largest concentration of fossil fuel and petrochemical operations in the Western Hemisphere. Residents of the parish are already exposed to levels of air pollution that drive high cancer rates, research has shown.

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Sharon Lavigne and her neighbors, fighting for the future of Welcome, Louisiana

In Welcome, residents have staunchly opposed Formosa’s newest plans for six years, led by neighbors like retired schoolteacher Sharon Lavigne. 

Six years ago, soon after Formosa announced its plans for the site in Welcome, Lavigne sat on her front porch and asked God whether to resist the petrochemical complex slated to be built in her backyard. 

This is the cause she was called to, says Lavigne, 72, who now devotes much of her time to the fight against Formosa and other, already-established polluters in St. James, her native parish, where she taught special education for nearly 40 years at St. James High School, on a site that is now a Koch methanol plant.

In 2018, Lavigne founded RISE St. James, a faith-based organization dedicated to fighting for environmental justice in her community. RISE St. James has hosted rallies, filed legal complaints about Formosa’s air permits and worked to inform their Cancer Alley neighbors about the dangers posed by Formosa Plastics’ planned petrochemical complex.

Last month, Lavigne drove an hour to New Orleans to join an all-female panel of environmentalists who spoke to 500 visiting concert-goers about the life-threatening emission levels in predominantly Black Louisiana towns like Welcome. 

“Just down the road from the historic 30th anniversary of Essence Festival, petrochemical facilities have been expanding to poison Black communities,” said Heather McTeer Toney, executive director of Beyond Petrochemicals, which aims to stop the rapid U.S. expansion of petrochemical plants, in an event co-sponsored by the Hip Hop Caucus, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that leverages Hip Hop culture to encourage young people to participate in the democratic process. 

Part of the 2024 Essence Festival of Culture, Nola Green: So Fresh, Seaux Clean drew an audience of 500 people who came to see environmental justice advocates alongside New Orleans musicians Dawn Richard and Big Freedia, who spoke out against the lack of air-quality protection for Louisiana residents.

Sharon Lavigne received enthusiastic applause as she was introduced as the founder and chief crusader of RISE St. James and as one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People, a designation she was given in April.

In 2016, Lavigne was diagnosed with hepatitis, or inflammation of the liver, which she attributes to industrial pollutants, such as particulate-matter pollution in the air she has breathed all of her life. Research shows that air pollution may cause liver disease, which can progress to conditions like hepatitis.  

“I’m not afraid,” said Lavigne. “They can’t stop us. God put a fire in us and we are ready to fight.”

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Formosa argues that pollution would be within LDEQ standards; residents disagree

The air permits for the yet-to-be-built Formosa plants were granted by the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (LDEQ) in 2020 and are set to expire at the beginning of 2025. 

Though recently reinstated, the permits haven’t been active for two years. 

That’s because, in 2022, the permits were vacated for Formosa’s failure to accurately assess the plant’s impact on the surrounding area, as required by the Clean Air Act. Judge Trudy White of Louisiana’s 19th Judicial District Court found that state regulators used “selective” and “inconsistent” data in evaluating the permit application and failed to consider how the plant’s emissions would affect air quality in the predominantly Black local community of Welcome.

For the next two years, Formosa Plastics’ lawyers argued for the return of those permits,  because, they say, air pollution from the facility would be within LDEQ standards.

In January, the permits were reinstated. Louisiana’s First Circuit Court of Appeal ruled that the LDEQ was entitled to its conclusion that the social and economic benefits of the complex would outweigh the environmental-impact costs. 

RISE St. James and other groups filed a still-pending request with the Louisiana Supreme Court, asking for the higher court to review the matter.

In July, Formosa Plastics submitted applications to renew the soon-to-expire permits. But those who oppose the Formosa complex say that the conglomerate has not yet proven that it deserves the permits – especially under new federal requirements, which have become more stringent since the Formosa permits were originally awarded.

To date, Formosa Plastics has not produced a full air-pollution model, as required by the Clean Air Act, to show the public how emissions from the petrochemical complex would accumulate and interact with the pollutants already affecting St. James Parish, said Michael Brown, senior attorney at Earthjustice.

Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law organization, has joined an information coalition with local groups such as RISE St. James to object to the permit renewals. In June, the groups sent a joint letter to the Air Permits Administrator of LDEQ, alerting him to updated federal rules regulating soot pollution, also known as PM2.5 or fine particulate matter.

Soot exposure leads to increased mortality, hospitalizations and visits to the emergency room. It is associated with asthma, heart disease, dementia, low birth weight and higher rates of infant death. A 2021 study found that fine particulate matter causes 85,000 to 200,000 excess deaths per year in the U.S. This type of air pollution is one of the most direct links to premature human mortality and disproportionately affects people of color.

Earlier this year, Earthjustice hired Wingra Engineering to produce a cumulative impact report using Formosa Plastics’ air emissions data. Neither Formosa nor LDEQ had entered the company’s data into the standard EPA model, AERMOD, Brown said.

St. James Parish is already heavily saturated with particulate matter air pollution, according to the findings of Steven Klafka, an environmental engineer with over 40 years of experience in permitting under the Clean Air Act. Emissions from Formosa Plastics would violate the updated federal soot standards, which protect residents against both long and short-term exposure to the pollutant, he found.

The model predicts widespread violations of the annual soot standard across a 17-mile stretch spanning both sides of the Mississippi River. The violations are predicted to rise more than five-times the level allowed by National Ambient Air Quality Standards. 

Lavigne found the report’s results to be deeply concerning. “As a mother and a grandmother, I worry everyday about the air our children are breathing,” she said, noting that Klafka’s findings show that industry polluters are already violating short-term exposure limits for particulate matter and other toxins in some areas of the parish.

Even before the soot standard was updated, environmentalists argued that the cumulative impact of Formosa Plastics’ projected emissions in St. James would violate the Clean Air Act. That was the reasoning behind the 19th Judicial District Court’s decision two years ago, which vacated all of the complex’s 15 air permits.

Without a doubt, Formosa Plastics cannot meet the updated soot standard, said Anne Rolfes, founding director of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, a nonprofit organization that worked with Earthjustice to submit independent air modeling to LDEQ. 

The new air modeling results require LDEQ to deny Formosa Plastics’ renewal applications or substantially reduce the complex’s allowable fine particulate emissions, the coalition of nonprofit organizations wrote, in the June letter to LDEQ. 

In a separate letter, Earthjustice asked the EPA to investigate LDEQ’s unwillingness to apply cumulative impact modeling for soot and other air pollutants across the state. 

“Members of RISE St. James have known from the very beginning that the air is already full. They’re already breathing air that’s too polluted,” Brown said. “LDEQ is not doing what it is required to do to clean up that mess and prevent Formosa Plastics from making it worse.”

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Vinyl chloride – forcing evacuations of entire Louisiana towns for decades now

In July, the EPA proposed changing its listing of a key plastics ingredient, vinyl chloride, to a “high-priority chemical” under the Toxic Substances Control Act. 

Vinyl chloride – a highly flammable gas and a human carcinogen known to cause liver cancer – is a building block of a plastic known as PVC, which is widely used in construction, for plumbing pipes and insulation for wires and cables.

Because of the new proposed change,  the EPA will spend the next several years considering the risks presented by vinyl chloride from “cradle to grave,” examining how people are exposed to and affected by the substance. If the EPA’s examination finds that vinyl chloride poses an “unreasonable risk,” then it would be more tightly restricted and could even be phased out or banned.

Also, last week, in a major policy shift, the United States announced its support for a global treaty to reduce plastic production. In November, members of the United Nations Environment Assembly will meet in Busan, South Korea to negotiate an international, legally-binding instrument on plastic pollution.

Any changes to vinyl chloride will reverberate within Louisiana. Companies who produce vinyl chloride are mostly in the South, with facilities in Louisiana producing 46% of the nation’s total and most of the rest coming from Texas, which accounts for 48% of the gas produced nationally, according to a report, released last month by Beyond Plastics, Earthjustice and Material Research L3C.

The report also analyzed who is exposed to vinyl chloride: “The majority of those living near vinyl chloride and PVC plants or disposal facilities are low-income people of color,” researchers found. Also, though people of color make up 41% of the nation’s population, 63% of residents within a 3-mile radius of these toxic sites are people of color. Most live in communities with low per capita incomes. 

Those demographics largely apply to four Louisiana fenceline communities that have been abandoned over the last 40 years because of toxic pollution from vinyl chloride facilities.

First came Revilletown, a small Black community adjacent to the town of Plaquemine in Iberville Parish, where a plume of vinyl chloride in the 1980s poisoned the water, seeping under residents’ homes from the Georgia-Gulf PVC facility. In 1987, the residents sued the company, which then paid to relocate the town as part of a settlement before bulldozing all of its buildings.

Next, vinyl chloride produced by Dow Chemical Company contaminated the groundwater near the town of Plaquemine, which led to the loss of Morrisonville, a town founded by freed slaves at the end of the Civil War. In 1989, Dow bought the land from the town’s residents to create a buffer zone between industry and residential communities.

Another spill of vinyl chloride was detected in 1997, but Plaquemine residents said that the water had likely been polluted for much longer. The Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals failed to alert LDEQ or the EPA to the 1997 spill. Nearly 300 residents in the Myrtle Grove trailer park were not informed that the contaminants had reached their water supply until 2001, nearly five years after the leak’s detection.

Vinyl chloride also struck Mossville, a once-thriving African American enclave near Lake Charles in Calcasieu Parish. Mossville was surrounded by 16 industrial facilities, including two vinyl chloride factories that ultimately proved to be the community’s demise. In 1998, the U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry tested people in the area for cancer-causing dioxins, a chemical released into the air during the production of PVC. Mossville residents were found to have dioxin levels three times higher than average compared to the general population. In 2013, the Sasol corporation offered voluntary buyouts. Though there were widespread reports of unfair pricing in the 90% Black community, most Mossville residents took the offers and relocated.

Formosa Plastics was not involved in any of the past mass evacuations of Black communities. But it has already faced stiff legal judgments for vinyl chloride emissions – by both air and water – within Louisiana and in other parts of the Gulf South.

In 2009, the EPA reached a $13 million agreement for “extensive” violations at Formosa plants in Louisiana and Texas. The agreement required Formosa to improve leak detection and repair programs in Point Comfort and Baton Rouge.

Five years ago, in 2019, a Formosa Plastics plant that has operated in Baton Rouge since 1981 received an investment of $332 million to expand the production of PVC by 20%. 

Earlier this year, following the court’s decision to restore the 2020 air permits for the St. James complex, Formosa Plastics announced a second but unspecified, “major” expansion of the PVC plant in Baton Rouge. The announcement was made at the end of July 2024, within a press release that does not include an investment amount.

Yet it’s unclear whether state and local economic incentives totaling $1.5 billion still make sense for the St. James facility. In April, a study by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis concluded that Formosa Plastics should reassess its plan for St. James Parish. Its analysts showed a decreased economic viability for the project because of market changes and international negotiations to reduce plastic pollution, according to a statement by the Institute. 

Plus, the domestic market is already oversupplied with plastic. Increased competition from Chinese plastic-production facilities also lowers international demand, the Institute noted. 

Yet production is not similarly booming in Taiwan. Instead, Formosa Plastics chairman Jason Lin told Bloomberg that Formosa’s investments in Texas and Louisiana save Formosa money – and the headaches they face with government permits. “In Taiwan, the government treats petrochemical investment as a polluting industry and stigmatizes us,” Lin told Bloomberg. 

Rolfes of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, who has watched the wreckage that vinyl chloride left across her home state over the past 40 years, shakes her head at the irony. The gigantic Formosa petrochemical complex slated for St. James Parish “could not be built in Taiwan because of health and safety concerns,” she said.

“So, really? That’s what we want to be in Louisiana?” Rolfes asked. “We want to be the place that will take the dirtiest industry?”