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environmental justice
Zero Waste Doesn’t Work Without Environmental Justice
As the zero waste movement continues to grow, it must center environmental justice and the communities who have had to bear the greatest burden of pollution.
Mar 30, 2026
Zero waste is often framed as an idealistic goal: a world without trash, pollution, or environmental harm. But like aiming for zero traffic fatalities or zero preventable diseases, zero waste isn’t about perfection; it’s about striving for measurable improvement. At its core, zero waste asks us to rethink how we produce, consume, and conserve our resources as well as how we dispose of our waste. Because right now, that waste does end up somewhere, and too often that somewhere is in Black, Indigenous, and brown communities.
Zero waste is about generating little to no waste through strategies such as waste reduction, composting, recycling, and industrial redesign, among others. Not only do these strategies support the reduction of waste, but they also lead to more resilient cities and communities, social equity, and healthier environments.
Although the zero waste movement has grown substantially in recent decades, it continues to be challenged (rightfully so) by those who see it developing into the next “organics” movement—a movement that once prioritized providing healthier food options only to those who can afford them at a premium. Thus, leaving many communities (mostly Indigenous, Black, and brown) without options for fresh food produced with increased standards and no added synthetic substances.
But similar to the organics movement, zero waste concepts have been around for generations and are deeply rooted in various cultures around the world. The irony is that these same communities being left out are the ones that have the greatest ancestral knowledge associated with producing organic food through their generational fights against colonialism, white supremacy, and capitalism.
The communities most impacted by the waste crisis are also leading the way toward solutions.
Historically, Black, brown, and Indigenous peoples have acted as stewards of our natural environment, but have been the most impacted by pollution. Policies like redlining have further concentrated polluting facilities, including waste facilities, in Black, brown, and Indigenous communities. In the United States specifically, the environmental justice (EJ) movement was birthed through various industrial fights against the siting of landfills and incinerators in mostly Black and brown communities.
Since 1982, the small community of Afton, located in Warren County, North Carolina, has often been referred to as one of the birthplaces of the environmental justice movement, as the local community fought against a new hazardous waste landfill. This low-income, rural, and majority Black community became responsible for the first arrests in US history over the siting of a landfill. Unfortunately, the people of Warren County lost the battle, but many considered this to be the first major milestone in the national movement for environmental justice.
It wasn’t just the community of Afton fighting against the siting of waste infrastructure. Indigenous, Black, and brown communities across the country were being inundated with industrial and toxic waste zoning, and the federal government knew this. In fact, this pattern was confirmed by a 1983 analysis by the US General Accounting Office, which concluded that most commercial waste treatment plants or waste dumps were more likely to be found near Black communities than near white communities.
These industries know these communities lack the resources and capacity to fight back to protect themselves. They even developed whole reports on this topic. The 1984 “Cerrell Report” was a document commissioned by the California Waste Management Board, which advised that waste incinerators be sited in low-income, rural, and Black and brown communities solely because these areas were deemed to have the least political resistance and capacity to oppose industrial projects. These communities are most impacted by waste policies and are often targeted by the waste industry for further development. The end result of this is decades of underinvestment, coupled with extreme health disparities and negative social impacts.
The communities most impacted by the waste crisis are also leading the way toward solutions. Across the country, communities are composting, reusing, and practicing zero waste as acts of resistance against systems that profit from landfills, incinerators, and other polluting facilities.
After more than a 30-year fight, community activists in Detroit finally shut down the city's incinerator in 2019. The facility was referred to as a “bad neighbor” due to it being a major source of air pollution, emitting pollutants like sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, lead, mercury, and cadmium throughout the surrounding communities. Recognizing local legislators believed the incinerator was the best way to handle the city’s waste, local activists took it upon themselves to develop a backyard community composting program to show not only that zero waste was possible in Detroit, but that community members wanted it and had bought into this idea.
Seven years later, the City of Detroit’s Office of Sustainability launched its first-ever Community Compost Pilot Program with a goal of diverting over 80,000 pounds annually of food waste from landfills and incinerators. If it weren’t for the initial efforts from community members, the City of Detroit would likely still be burning its trash to this day.
And, it's not just Detroit. Activists in California closed down the last two incinerators in the state in favor of developing new zero waste policies. Specifically, they targeted the vast amount of public tax subsidies that were being used to prop up the incinerator industry, as incinerators are incredibly inefficient and expensive to operate. Instead, that money is now being directed toward real zero waste solutions such as waste reduction, composting, recycling, and industrial redesign, among others.
In addition to closing the facilities of the past, EJ communities have now begun influencing the facilities of the future through the development of new statewide landfill methane regulations. The states of California and Colorado have both recently updated their landfill methane regulations to include stronger protections for vulnerable communities and higher accountability for the waste sector. Many of these recommendations came directly from EJ communities suffering the most from the impacts of landfills.
This is only a small snapshot of the hundreds of communities across the country working to demonstrate that community-led zero waste strategies can reduce emissions, reduce waste, and reduce harm. From Louisiana to Oregon, from Maine all the way to California… Practical solutions to our waste and climate crisis already exist, and as the zero waste movement continues to grow, it must center environmental justice and the communities who have had to bear the greatest burden of pollution, too often for generations.
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Trump's Environmental Massacre
The EPA’s decision to erase the value of lives lost or saved by regulations is a horror beyond the pale. It opens the door for government-sanctioned death with a baked-in cover-up.
Mar 14, 2026
Last March, I interviewed staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency’s Region 5 headquarters in Chicago who were horrified by the Trump administration’s staff and funding cuts, which notably included eliminating environmental justice and diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.
The threat of those cuts was so severe that Brian Kelly, an on-site emergency coordinator based in Michigan, predicted: “People will die. There will be additional deaths if we roll back these protections.”
How many additional deaths? The Trump EPA will not say. As part of President Donald Trump’s crusade to destroy federal science and roll back environmental safeguards, his EPA announced recently that it will no longer consider the monetary value of saving lives by regulating fine particulate matter, commonly called soot, smaller than 2.5 micrometers in diameter (PM 2.5) and ozone smog from vehicles, fossil-fuel-burning power plants, and other polluting industries.
In other words, the agency intends to conduct cost-benefit analyses by only considering the cost.
We Need Stronger Pollution Regs
The data documenting soot’s deadly damage even with environmental rules in place is voluminous, much coming from the federal government itself, suggesting that we need stronger regulations, not weaker ones.
A 1997 EPA report found the first 20 years of the 1970 Clean Air Act were so effective that 205,000 premature deaths were avoided from all air pollution sources in 1990. The same report concluded that the 1990 amendments to the law would save more than 230,000 lives a year by 2020 and prevent 2.4 million asthma attacks.
By disbanding DEI and environmental justice programs, the Trump administration is ensuring that communities of color are collateral damage in sucking the Earth dry of oil and gas and mining for the last lump of coal.
Even so, air pollution remains mortally high in a nation that is now the world’s biggest producer of oil and gas and stubbornly prioritizes individually owned vehicles over public transportation. A 2021 study funded by the EPA and published in the journal Science Advances found that PM 2.5 alone still accounts for 85,000 to 200,000 excess deaths a year.
The conclusions of nongovernmental studies echo the EPA’s own findings. A 2022 University of Wisconsin study, for example, estimated that if the United States eliminated all fine particulate, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxide emissions from electricity generation, vehicles, factories, and buildings, 53,200 premature deaths a year could be prevented, providing $600 billion in health benefits from avoided illness and mortality.
Drill Baby Drill’s Collateral Damage
The Trump EPA’s recent announcement is just another of a string of nonsensical—and dangerous—moves by the agency. They include abandoning the Paris Climate Accord and killing the agency’s 2009 “endangerment finding” determining that carbon pollution threatens human health, which the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) estimates will cut short the lives of as many as 58,000 people over the next 30 years due to additional pollution.
Taken together, the Trump administration’s assault on public health has the potential of triggering an environmental massacre, particularly among the most vulnerable Americans.
Because of our nation’s history of housing discrimination, communities of color, regardless of income, face more than twice the risk of exposure to PM 2.5 than white communities. According to the 2021 Sciences Advances study, this “phenomenon is systemic, holding for nearly all major sectors, as well as across states and urban and rural areas, income levels, and exposure levels…. Targeting locally important sources for mitigation could be one way to counter this persistence.”
By disbanding DEI and environmental justice programs, the Trump administration is ensuring that communities of color are collateral damage in sucking the Earth dry of oil and gas and mining for the last lump of coal. An August 2025 Science Advances study found that the life cycle of oil and gas extraction, storage, transporting, refining, and combustion results in 91,000 annual premature deaths due to exposure to PM 2.5, nitrogen dioxide, and ozone. It found that, with rare exception, “Asian, Black, Hispanic, and Native American groups experience the worst exposures and burdens for all life-cycle stages and pollutants.” A 2023 New England Journal of Medicine study, meanwhile, concluded that reducing PM 2.5 pollution alone would disproportionately benefit Blacks at all income levels as well as low-income whites.
EPA Now Stands for Every Polluter’s Ally
Without a single fact to back up its claim, the Trump EPA—led by the fossil fuel industry-friendly Lee Zeldin—stated it did away with calculating lives saved because prior estimates were done with “false precision and confidence.” In fact, the agency is now simply repeating the talking points of the oil and gas industry and the US Chamber of Commerce, which has a long history of lobbying Congress to resist climate legislation and filing endless amicus briefs on behalf of polluters to counter environmental lawsuits.
In 2018, during the first the Trump administration, the chamber asserted—also with no evidence—that previous to the Trump EPA, the agency “historically misinformed and misled the public by using inconsistent and opaque analytical and communication methods regarding costs and benefits.”
That same year, the Trump EPA offered a revealing nugget of information that was hardly opaque. It admitted that its effort to kill the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which would have reined in power plant carbon pollution, would result in in as many as 1,400 premature deaths a year by 2030, and thousands more annual cases of respiratory diseases. At the time, Trump was also trying to roll back Obama-era clean air vehicle standards that were projected to save nearly 40,000 lives a year by 2030.
In its last year in office, the Biden administration proposed tightening PM 2.5 standards, estimating that it could prevent as many as 4,500 premature deaths in 2032 and lead to $46 billion in health benefits in 2032.
There is not a single word about protecting lives or lowering healthcare costs in the EPA’s February 12 press release announcing its repeal of the endangerment finding nor in its February 20 press release hailing the repeal of tighter mercury and air toxics standards enacted by the Biden administration. Instead, Zeldin claimed—without proof—that the air pollution rules would have “destroyed reliable American energy” and revoking the endangerment finding would save Americans more than $1.3 trillion, including an average cost savings of more than $2,400 on a new vehicle.
While Zeldin is trying to use the greater availability of cheaper, gas-guzzling cars as a lure to seduce the public to look the other way on environmental regulations, the pollution they emit will smoke the nation. EDF estimates that higher-polluting vehicles could, by 2055:
- Cost US drivers as much as $1.4 trillion in increased fuel costs;
- Emit carbon pollution that will intensify climate change-related extreme weather events, costing $1.5 trillion to $4.2 trillion; and
- Increase respiratory and heart disease, as well as the number of premature deaths, costing $170 billion to $500 billion.
None of that mattered to the first Trump administration, which admitted its regulatory rollbacks could kill people. When the second Trump administration barreled into office with its cutbacks and deep-sixing of environmental justice and DEI programs, staffers in the EPA Chicago Region 5 office feared the worst. They included Kayla Butler, a Superfund community involvement coordinator. The stories her team collects in the field of people living with toxic horrors are precisely the stories she said the Trump administration is “trying to erase.”
The EPA’s decision to erase the value of lives lost or saved by regulations is a horror beyond the pale. It opens the door for government-sanctioned death with a baked-in cover-up. With the death toll from air pollution still so high, the Trump EPA is burying the data with the bodies, so we will never know the cause.
This article first appeared at the Money Trail blog and is reposted here at Common Dreams with permission.
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Frontline Groups Have the Solutions to the Climate Crisis, Not Corporate Profiteers
As people throughout the globe prepare for the First International Conference for the Phase-Out of Fossil Fuels in Santa Marta, Colombia, in April, a frontline-led just transition must be given center stage.
Feb 17, 2026
On February 12, 2026, the US Environmental Protection Agency repealed the Endangerment Finding, a key determination for regulating greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. This decision follows the EPA’s January 2026 announcement that air quality protections will be determined based on corporations’ bottom lines, not people’s health. These harmful decisions join a dizzying number of other regulations essential for environmental justice that have been dismantled, deregulated, or destroyed.
In these times, it would be easy to despair about how the tireless movement organizing labor that made these strides possible over many years has now been eroded. However, we cannot accept defeat. My decades of frontline organizing with workers and environmental justice communities toward a just transition shows that transformations come from our collective power. No matter the obstacles, we have the real solutions needed for the crucial work ahead, including during the upcoming Santa Marta conference.
Last year marked a huge moment for just transition. This movement and the principles that inform it often took center stage in grassroots organizing and during the United Nations Climate Summit in Belém, Brazil, in November 2025. The popularity of this concept, practice, and process reveals both promising and harmful co-opted outcomes for Indigenous Peoples, frontline workers, and fenceline communities. The language can be amplified by those most impacted, used to communicate their demands and desires, and it can be used as a tool for trying to undermine the hard work of community organizations and frontline communities.
At COP30, while we welcomed progressive news media coverage and the labor of journalists to cover such an intense few weeks of climate justice and just transition advocacy, we also witnessed reporting by some Global North journalists and news outlets that worked to minimize the credibility of frontline groups and community-based organizations, while amplifying the voices and positions of false solutionists and disaster capitalists.
Unlike some researchers who argue that the negotiations can be improved by using generative artificial intelligence for creating treaty drafts, we know who has the real solutions and who must be centered in building pathways toward just transition.
Much mainstream coverage of COP30 has not adequately addressed the indispensable role of grassroots organizing in pushing toward the successful implementation of a Just Transition Mechanism within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Several days before the official start of COP30, the Movimiento de Afectados por Represas held the IV International Encuentro (Meeting) of People Affected by Dams and the Climate Crisis. This global gathering resulted in the launch of an international movement. Similarly, the Peoples’ Summit, including a just transition axis, was integral in building relationships and movement power. These mobilizations and knowledge sharing spaces worked synergistically with the Global Day of Action for Climate Justice, which occurred on November 15, with people of the world overflowing into the streets of Belém. It was these preceding and concurrent gatherings that energized Just Transition cross-constituencies and that shaped the direction of the Just Transition Work Programme negotiations and the resulting Just Transition Mechanism.
Many celebrate the institutionalization of just transition as one of the greatest successes at COP30. However, much work remains in the implementation process for the new mechanism to actually advance a just transition. Without a commitment to and practice of Indigenous Principles of Just Transition and Just Transition Principles, this mechanism will become another failed effort and abuse of the labor of frontline peoples and grassroots groups who have fought so hard for so long.
Unlike some researchers who argue that the negotiations can be improved by using generative artificial intelligence for creating treaty drafts, we know who has the real solutions and who must be centered in building pathways toward just transition. Groups practicing agroecology and Landback, as well as waste pickers and many other frontline workers, are creating collective power that brings together the most affected workers and environmental justice communities, rather than pitting them against each other.
Additionally, as knowledge holders, Indigenous Peoples and Afro-Indigenous Peoples hold inherent and collective rights; accordingly, they should not be conflated as part of “civil society.” We know that Indigenous Peoples and civil society members must be the ones consulted and centered in these key United Nations negotiations and texts, not the corporate profiteers and their political cronies who pollute just transition possibilities at every COP and at many other conferences.
This year marks 35 years since I served on the drafting committee of the Principles of Environmental Justice and 30 years since I contributed to the Jemez Principles for Democratic Organizing. These principles and the relationships and lived experiences that gave them life continue to inform and fortify our movements toward just transition and a livable world where we all can thrive. Let’s not forget these principles and the frontline peoples who made them possible.
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