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Across the United States, thousands of people, most of them in low-income or minority communities, live next to heavily polluting industrial sites. Many of them reach a point at which they say \"Enough is enough.\" After living for years with poisoned air and water, contaminated soil, and pollution-related health problems, they start to take action--organizing, speaking up, documenting the effects of pollution on their neighborhoods. In Sacrifice Zones, Steve Lerner tells the stories of twelve communities, from Brooklyn to Pensacola, that rose up to fight the industries and military bases causing disproportionately high levels of chemical pollution. He calls these low-income neighborhoods \"sacrifice zones.\" And he argues that residents of these sacrifice zones, tainted with chemical pollutants, need additional regulatory protections. Sacrifice Zones goes beyond the disheartening statistics and gives us the voices of the residents themselves, offering compelling portraits of accidental activists who have become grassroots leaders in the struggle for environmental justice and details the successful tactics they have used on the fenceline with heavy industry.

Impacted groundwater at hazardous waste release sites often contain mixtures of contaminants. It can be relatively easy to treat some compounds ex situ. However, mixtures of some compounds can be difficult to treat. A method to extract and treat complex mixtures of contaminants of concern using phytotechnology is proposed in this paper. A specific case study is described wherein a hybrid phytoremediation system is compared and contrasted with conventional groundwater and phytoremediation technologies. Nitrate is used as an exemplar co-contaminant since nitrate contamination is (1) widespread in the United States, and (2) difficult and expensive to treat. The approach involves using contaminated groundwater as a source of irrigation water for a phytoremediation grove. Groundwater would be extracted using conventional groundwater extraction methods. Groundwater then would be pumped to multiple irrigation zones under the control of an autonomous irrigation system. Each zone would consist of a number of trees. The root system for each tree would be modified to function as a confined treatment cell that facilitates contaminated water uptake. The irrigation controller would optimize the amount of groundwater that can be extracted and treated while preventing surface water runoff away from the phyto component.

Many countries are faced with monumental cleanup tasks remaining from World War II and the Cold War and consistent methodologies are essential to assess the risk from pollutants and the risk from cleanup. In the USA, the Department of Energy (DOE), and other federal and state agencies need to be able to rapidly evaluate the risk to ecological resources for remediation projects. While ecological risk assessments for radionuclides and other contaminants can be performed for different species, evaluations of species assemblages, communities, and ecosystems is more difficult. We summarize an evaluation method for ecological resources on individual remediation units that will allow comparison among a large number of units and that can be modified and applied to the DOE complex-wide. We evaluated the deactivation and decommissioning (D & D) facilities at the Hanford site as case studies. Remediation of these sites has the potential to provide harm to, or increase the value of, ecological resources during and after the process. The evaluation method includes three categories: (1) general steps, (2) ecological descriptions, and (3) ecological ratings. The general steps include identifying the categories of resources (level of resource value), identifying the units to be evaluated (e.g., remediation units), identifying a reasonable ecological buffer around the evaluation units, identifying the remediation options (from milestones or other agreements), and developing a rating scale. Ecological descriptions include identifying previous ecological values of specific areas on the evaluation unit, conducting field studies to assess the current conditions, and summarizing the percent of each resource value on the evaluation unit and buffer area. The ecological risk of harm is determined by using the rating scale to evaluate the potential harm to the ecological (and eco-cultural) resources on each evaluation unit currently, during remediation, and in the post-remediation phase. Currently, the risks (potential harm) to ecological resources on the D & D facilities at the Hanford site are non-discernible, but they increase to very high (for reactors) during remediation when there is physical disruption, increased traffic and personnel, and possible increased contamination. Following remediation, the potential harm to ecological resources is low, and the value may be increased due to restoration of native vegetation on sites that were largely industrial prior to remediation. These methods provide managers, regulators, tribes, and the general public with assurance that ecological and eco-cultural resources and the environment are being protected during and following remediation.

Increased reliance on subcontractors in all economic sectors is a serious occupational health and safety challenge. Short-term cost savings are offset by long-term liability. Hiring subcontractors brings specialized knowledge but also young, inexperienced, inadequately trained workers onto industrial and hazardous waste sites, which leads to increased rates of accidents and injuries. Reliable data on subcontractor occupational health and safety programs and performance are sparse. The US Department of Energy has an excellent safety culture on paper, but procurement practices and contract language deliver a mixed message—including some safety disincentives. Its biphasic safety outcome data are consistent with underreporting by some subcontractors and underachievement by others. These observations are relevant to the private and public sectors. Occupational health and safety should be viewed as an asset, not merely a cost.

Association for Humanist Sociology 2007 Book Award co-winnerJulian Steward Award 2006 Runner-Up!Over the past two decades, environmental racism has become the rallying cry for many communities as they discover the contaminations of toxic chemicals and industrial waste in their own backyards.Living next door to factories and industrial sites for years, the people in these communities often have record health problems and debilitating medical conditions. Melissa Checker tells the story of one such neighborhood, Hyde Park, in Augusta, Georgia, and the tenacious activism of its two hundred African American families. This community, at one time surrounded by nine polluting industries, is struggling to make their voices heard and their community safe again. Polluted Promises shows that even in the post-civil rights era, race and class are still key factors in determining the politics of pollution.

Federal agencies manage hazardous waste sites under the assumption that environmental restoration will improve the environment by returning contaminated groundwater to beneficial use, removing waste residuals from a site, treating discharges to surface water, and reducing overall risks to human health and the environment. However, the associated time-consuming and expensive operations, extensive performance monitoring, and post-closure care can lead to unanticipated environmental impacts due to both the technological nature of these cleanup activities and the related protracted timelines. These life-cycle impacts can and should be included in the evaluation of remedial alternatives. Increasingly, Federal agencies are considering these life-cycle impacts—variously referred to as “environmental footprint analysis,” “sustainable remediation,” “green remediation,” “greener remediation,” and “green and sustainable remediation”—when evaluating environmental restoration approaches. For the purposes of this paper, this concept will be referred to as “green and sustainable remediation” (GSR), with application of GSR assumed to take place across the cleanup life cycle, from the investigation phase through site closeout. This paper will discuss the history of GSR, what GSR is, who is implementing GSR, and GSR metrics. The paper will also discuss two approaches to GSR, using case studies to understand and implement it; the first will be a qualitative approach, and the second a more detailed quantitative approach.

The U.S. EPA defines brownfields as \"idle real property, the development or improvement of which is impaired by real or perceived contamination.\" The authors of Principles of Brownfield Regeneration argue that, compared to \"greenfields\"-farmland, forest, or pasturelands that have never been developed-brownfields offer a more sustainable land development choice. They believe that brownfields are central to a sustainable strategy of thwarting sprawl, preserving or regenerating open space, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and reinvesting in urbanized areas. Drawing on interviews with people involved in brownfield projects as well as on their own considerable expertise, the authors use five case studies to describe the steps for cleaning up a site and creating viable land for development or open space.

The starting point for this research was a case study of illegal hazardous waste disposal published 25 years ago in theJournal of Environmental Health. The site, located in rural upstate New York, would eventually be managed under county, state, and national remediation programs. For this paper, the authors conducted a historical analysis of reports published about the site. They also interviewed federal, state, and local officials, as well as nearby residents. Drawing on the data obtained in these ways, the paper reviews remedial efforts and community involvement. Despite considerable time and resources invested by stakeholders, groundwater pollution persists at the site. As responsibility for remediation moved through higher levels of government, the character of community involvement shifted from proactive to reactive to quiescent. Today, neighboring residents perceive health problems and demonstrate feelings of powerlessness. Remedial activity has required greater investigation over time, resulting in more documents detailing a larger number of parameters with increasing scientific sophistication. This approach has boosted understanding of groundwater pollution. At the same time, recent remediation has been deprived of useful knowledge that could have been provided by greater local participation in decision making.

In this Article, Professor Foster examines the environmental justice movement from the \"ground up\"-from the perspective of the predominantly poor, African-American residents of Chester, Pennsylvania who attempted to stop the clustering of waste facilities in their community. From this perspective, Professor Foster evaluates the manner in which the phenomenon of environmental injustice is framed, the efficacy of reforms in environmental decision-making processes, and the strategies and possibilities of grassroots efforts in achieving environmental justice. She argues that the distributive paradigm that often frames discussions of environmental injustice obscures the mechanisms and processes underlying inequitable outcomes, thwarting a full understanding of the phenomenon. Case studies such as Chester, however, illustrate that disproportionate exposure to environmental hazards result from a set of ongoing social processes that structure the political economy of poor communities of color. These grassroots struggles provide a window into the social relations and processes underlying distributive inequities and, thus, assist reformers in identifying the types of policy reforms likely to help achieve environmental justice. Professor Foster argues that achieving environmental justice requires that siting reforms take both social structure and process seriously. She, however, concludes that while siting reform is necessary to achieve environmental justice, it should not displace the kind of transformative political action currently taking place in communities such as Chester. This political action is crucial to marginalized communities hoping to gain access and contribute to the policy- and decision-making processes that affect their material interests.