ENVIRONMENT: Olympic Trash Goes to Poor Minorities in Atlanta

By Pratap Chatterjee Reprint | | Print |

Pratap Chatterjee

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug 6 1996 (IPS) - The Olympic athletes have returned home with their medals, and the millions of spectators who thronged the stadiums have resumed their normal lives. But they all left something behind: their trash — and some very upset Atlanta citizens.

For more than a week, the company Microlife Systems has trucked discarded food and other degradable trash to a large warehouse on Fulton Industrial Boulevard in southwest Atlanta for sorting. Browning-Ferris Industries has taken recycled material to another warehouse on Distribution Drive in the northwest.

Both warehouses are in predominantly African-American neighbourhoods. The Distribution Drive warehouse has been operating for over a year, sorting Atlanta’s regular trash, but the Industrial Boulevard warehouse was requisitioned specially for the Olympic games.

“Many in black Atlanta are fighting mad,” says Art Geter, an Atlanta resident. “The Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games gave others the profits and want to give us the garbage.”

Others are not surprised.

“Our communities have a history of being given the trash,” says Marcus Sherrill of the Southern Organising Committee. “A majority of the polluting industries in this city are in west Atlanta.”

County commissioner Emma Darnell acted just before the Games to block Microlife’s use of the Fulton Industrial Boulevard warehouse, by refusing to issue a local permit for the facility. But Brian Donnelly, president of Microlife, immediately went to court to obtain an injunction against the county decision.

The court issued a hand-written order Jul. 26, allowing Microlife to use the warehouse until the end of August, on the condition that the company employs a monitor to observe the trash- sorting operations in order to report back to the court.

William Ashburn, the appointed monitor, went to the site to begin his duties as the Olympic Games entered their final hours Friday. His job is to ensure that no waste is left exposed, no toxic fumes or bad smells are allowed to escape the warehouse, and that no trucks stay at the warehouse for longer than 20 minutes.

Commissioner Darnell is still unhappy about the court injunction, but there is nothing she can do. She joined the Southern Organising Committee Jul. 30 in issuing a statement to condemn the plans.

“These neighbourhoods already suffer from the effects of unhealthy and unsustainable development,” she says. “We found that my district has a cancer mortality rate 29 percent greater than the rest of Fulton county, with an asthma rate of 4.1 per 100,000 people, compared to a rate of 1.6 for the rest of the county.”

Darnell says the garbage plans fit the “pattern of race- and class-based siting of operations of polluting facilities.”

She cites Robert Bullard, a Clark Atlanta University academic, who wrote the book ‘Dumping in Dixie’, which describes environmental racism.

“Poor communities and people of colour have more than their fair share of garbage dumps, landfills, incinerators, sewer treatment plants,” he wrote. “These facilities are not randomly distributed across the urban landscape. On the other hand, the same communities are short-changed when it comes to residential services and public amenities.”

In fact, according to the 1994 report ‘Toxic Wastes and Race Revisited,’ three times as many residents from minority groups live in areas near hazardous waste facilities than in areas without such operations.

The report by Benjamin Goldman and Laura Fitton was prepared by the Centre for Policy Alternatives, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the Commission for Racial Justice of the United Church of Christ (UCC).

The report says that the number of people living near commercial hazardous waste facilities is growing. In 1980, only a quarter of the population near such facilities were from minority groups. By 1993, the figures were up by a quarter to 31 percent. Minorities are now 47 percent more likely to live near such waste operations than whites.