IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/apl/wpaper/24-13.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Layers of injustice: A distributional assessment of toxic chemical facilities, releases, and cleanups

Author

Listed:
  • Sarah Brodin
  • Dennis Guignet

Abstract

The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976 (RCRA) is a cornerstone of environmental policy in the United States. The law regulates the generation, transportation, storage, and disposal of hazardous chemicals. Unfortunately, hazardous releases are known to occur due to flawed equipment, human error, and dated historical practices. Releases are investigated and remediated through what is collectively known as a Corrective Action (CA). Using Census data and a novel dataset of RCRA facilities across the contiguous US, we examine the possibility of systematic inequities with regards to the (i) siting of RCRA facilities, (ii) occurrence of releases and CAs, (iii) duration of CAs, and (iv) permanence of remediation methods. We find evidence of disproportionate impacts across racial, ethnic, and income dimensions. The results vary, however, depending on the different aspects of the siting and cleanup process, thus emphasizing the need for multi-layered analyses to identify and fully understand potential inequities associated with environmental programs. Key Words: chemical, cleanup, environmental justice, equity, hazardous waste, RCRA

Suggested Citation

  • Sarah Brodin & Dennis Guignet, 2024. "Layers of injustice: A distributional assessment of toxic chemical facilities, releases, and cleanups," Working Papers 24-13, Department of Economics, Appalachian State University.
  • Handle: RePEc:apl:wpaper:24-13
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://econ.appstate.edu/RePEc/pdf/wp2413.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    chemical; cleanup; environmental justice; equity; hazardous waste; rcra;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement
    • Q53 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Air Pollution; Water Pollution; Noise; Hazardous Waste; Solid Waste; Recycling
    • Q56 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Environment and Development; Environment and Trade; Sustainability; Environmental Accounts and Accounting; Environmental Equity; Population Growth

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:apl:wpaper:24-13. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: O. Ashton Morgan (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/deappus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.