The Sustainability Imperative - Sustainable Design: The Science of Sustainability and Green Engineering - page 243

Case Study: West Dallas Lead Smelter
In 1954, the Dallas, Texas, Housing Authority built a large public housing
project on land immediately adjacent to a lead smelter. The project had 3500
living units and became a predominantly African-American community. Dur-
ing the 1960s the lead smelter stacks emitted over 200 tons of lead into the air
annually. Recycling companies had owned and operated the smelter to recover
lead from as many as 10,000 car batteries per day. The lead emissions were
associated with blood lead levels in the housing project's children, and these
were 35% higher than in children from comparable areas.
Lead is a particularly insidious pollutant because it can result in develop-
mental damage. Study after study showed that the children at this project were
in danger of higher lead levels, but nothing was done for over 20 years. Finally,
in the early 1980s, the city brought suit against the lead smelter, and the smelter
immediately initiated control measures that reduced its emissions to allowable
standards. The smelter also agreed to clean up the contaminated soil around
the smelter and to pay compensation to people who had been harmed.
This case illustrates two issues of environmental racism and injustice. First,
the housing units should never have been built next to a potentially hazardous
source, in this instance a lead smelter. The reason for locating the units there
might have been justified on the basis of economics. The land was inexpensive
and this saved the government money. The second issue is timing and timeli-
ness. The foot dragging by the city in insisting that the smelter clean up the
emissions created a type of inertia that was increasingly difficult to overcome.
Once the case had been made, within two years the plant was in compliance.
By 2003, blood lead levels in West Dallas were below the national average.
Why did it take 20 years for the city to do the right thing?
Sources : D. E. Newton, Environmental Justice, Oxford University Press, New York, 1996 and
Personal conversation with P. Aarne Vesilind.
Despite the general advances in environmental protection in the United States,
the achievements have not been evenly disseminated throughout our history en-
vironmental science and engineering. Like most aspects of our culture for the
past three centuries, has not been completely just and fair. The history of en-
vironmental contamination teems with examples in which certain segments of
society have been exposed inordinately to chemical hazards. This has been par-
ticularly problematic for communities of low socioeconomic status. For exam-
ple, the landmark study by the Commission for Racial Justice of the United
Church of Christ 34 found that the rate of landfill siting and the presence of haz-
ardous sites in a community were disproportionately higher in African-American