Over the past few years, some homes in the 90% Black census tract located uncomfortably close to the proposed Formosa Plastics plant in St. James Parish, Louisiana, have been outfitted with new air quality monitors.
The proposed plant would be in the River Parishes — the 85-mile stretch between Baton Rouge and Louisiana, more infamously known as Cancer Alley. And there are already numerous petrochemical facilities nearby, which spew carcinogens like benzene, formaldehyde, ethylene oxide, and chloroprene into the air. In St. John the Baptist Parish alone, where the Denka Performance Elastomer plant operates, 93% of residents living within a mile of the facility are Black. And so new air quality sensors, made by a company called Purple Air, were installed to help gather more data to show that the toxic burden of the community is already far too high.
But a new state law that went into effect last year makes it illegal to use data from such sensors, which do not meet strict federal standards, in any legal action over pollution regulations. Now, a coalition of environmental groups is suing the state, arguing that the law violates residents’ free-speech rights.
Under the law, any citizen pollution monitoring would have to be conducted with sensors that can run upward of $60,000, instead of the $300 that a PurpleAir monitor costs, in order to be used for anything beyond informational purposes. For pollution data to be legally permissible in Louisiana, it has to be analyzed by a state-accredited lab, too, of which there are 175. Not only does the law impose an upfront financial burden on local environmental organizations, but it also has a harsh fee structure: violators of the law can be fined thousands of dollars per day.
“This is a case of the state saying we do not want you to talk about your air monitoring,” Caitlion Hunter, an attorney for Rise St. James, told Louisiana Public Radio. “We are putting restrictions on your speech. We are restricting how you can talk about your air monitoring. We’re restricting how you can put that information on your website. We are restricting how you can try to use it in court.”
The lawsuit was filed by Environmental Integrity Project and Public Citizen Litigation Group on behalf of Rise St. James and other organizations.
Former teacher Sharon Lavigne founded Rise St. James in 2018 to advocate for environmental justice in the community. In 2021, she told Now This that when she was a little girl, she could go outside and “oh that fresh breath of air. It was so wonderful. Now you go out the door, you’re going to smell chemicals.”
Mary Hampton, president of Concerned Citizens of St. John, also told Now This that residents can “show you this little nebulizer that you keep in your purse. Everybody has to use them, even the children. That’s how bad the air is.”
The EPA itself sometimes uses PurpleAir sensors alongside its own monitors.
Activists like Hampton and Lavigne called for the EPA to fight the petrochemical industry in Cancer Alley. And so the irony of requiring sensors that meet EPA standards for citizen pollution monitoring projects is that there has been a boom in such efforts because of funding made available through the EPA.
There was $81 million in the Inflation Reduction Act earmarked for pollution monitoring projects, and many environmental nonprofits bought sensors such as those made by PurpleAir after winning grants from that funding.
While the more high-tech monitors that meet EPA standards (and are the kind of sensor intended to be installed at a petrochemical plant, not the too-close homes across the fence line) are more sensitive than the low-cost models, studies show that PurpleAir data reliably tracks with EPA-approved monitors. The EPA itself sometimes uses PurpleAir sensors alongside its own monitors.
David Bookbinder, director of law and policy at the Environmental Integrity Project, told The Associated Press that the PurpleAir monitors give “perfectly adequate results” and people need “to be able to tell your community, your family, whether or not the air they’re breathing is safe.”
Louisiana was the first state to pass such a law against low-cost air monitoring sensors, but Kentucky now has a similar statute on the books, too. West Virginia had its own version introduced into the legislature last year, but that bill did not pass.
