Dive Brief:
- The Trump administration announced Wednesday it will shut down all environmental justice offices and officially end other EJ-related initiatives, a move that will impact how waste and recycling industries measure and track their environmental impact on neighboring communities.
- The closures include the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights, created during the Biden administration to work directly with communities on EJ-related issues. The announcement followed a decision from the U.S. EPA to cancel numerous grants meant to fund environmental justice projects.
- The agency has quietly shut down other EJ-related tools in recent weeks, notably EJScreen, an open-source mapping and screening tool waste companies use to track environmental justice factors, such as health and socioeconomic data, near facilities.
Dive Insight:
The U.S. EPA under Trump has hinted at ending environmental justice initiatives for the last few weeks, calling such programs “forced discrimination.” The administration first announced its plans to end EJ-related programs in January, when Trump signed an executive order on the matter.
“Some believe that so-called ‘environmental justice’ is warranted to assist communities that have been left behind. This idea sounds good in theory and receives bipartisan support,” said EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin in a statement Wednesday. “But in reality, ‘environmental justice’ has been used primarily as an excuse to fund left-wing activists instead of actually spending those dollars to directly remediate environmental issues for those communities.”
The Trump administration’s view on environmental justice is a major departure from the Biden administration, which intended EJ to be a permanent facet of the EPA’s work, acknowledging that many Americans face a disproportionate amount of pollution and health impacts due to the impacts of racism and climate change.
Environmental groups have criticized the EPA’s decision to end environmental justice initiatives, saying the move will leave communities with fewer resources to advocate for pollution cleanup and prevention efforts and hold some businesses less accountable for pollution.
“Trump’s EPA is taking us back to a time of unfettered pollution across the nation, leaving every American exposed to toxic chemicals, dirty air and contaminated water,” said Matthew Tejada, senior vice president of environmental health at the Natural Resources Defense Council, in an emailed statement. Tejada led the EPA’s environmental justice office during the Biden administration.
Without federal-level environmental justice support, grassroots groups and states with EJ-specific laws are likely to shoulder the responsibility, environmental groups said.
The Environmental Protection Network called the EPA’s announcement a “profound setback for environmental justice efforts nationwide, one that strips the EPA of the personnel and resources necessary to protect communities disproportionately burdened by pollution and climate change.”
The EPA had previously called for terminating numerous grant programs with connections to environmental justice work, a move EPN Executive Director Michelle Roos said further harms communities that relied on funding for key remediation and pollution prevention programs.
“The more the public understands how this affects the health and safety of their families, the more pressure will grow for Congress to stand up to Trump’s reckless assaults on EPA,” she said in a statement.
The EPA’s decision to take EJScreen offline has also led to confusion for industries that once relied on that data, said Chris Whitehead, an environmental justice consultant. The screening tool mapped socioeconomic, climate and health data to show how specific areas face disproportionately higher environmental burdens related to climate, poverty and pollution.
In the waste industry, EJScreen was used to help gather data necessary for companies to determine if they are meeting sustainability metrics. Regulators have also used EJScreen as a key tool to help determine permitting decisions.
WM, Republic Services, and Waste Connections have all used updated EJScreen data in the past few years for their sustainability reports and any required environmental justice documentation. This includes reports that analyze demographics, such as race and income level, of communities within a certain radius of their operations. These companies have said data transparency is an important part of operations and their relationships with neighbors.
It’s also been a way for members of the public and grassroots environmental groups to push back against facilities’ expansion plans and raise awareness of environmental issues in their neighborhoods, according to the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative. EJScreen launched for the public in 2015.
Although the original EJScreen is gone, Whitehead said multiple organizations had known in advance that environmental justice resources would likely be a target and “acted preemptively to save the data and functionality.” Harvard University has reassembled a version of EJScreen using data scraped from the original version, and Public Environmental Data Partners also launched an unofficial reconstruction of the tool.
EJScreen isn’t the only tool available to analyze this data. There are at least 16 states, including Maryland, Massachusetts and Minnesota, that have developed state-level environmental justice mapping tools, Whitehead said. “If people know where to look, they’ll be able to still find the data,” he said.
Some of these EJScreen-like tools are an integral part of state environmental laws. Minnesota passed the Frontline Communities Protection Act in 2023, which will require some businesses, landfills included, to conduct more in-depth environmental analyses when seeking a new or updated air permit. New Jersey and Massachusetts also have similar laws, known as “cumulative impact” laws, which recognize that certain neighborhoods face pollution from multiple sources.
