Fifteenth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability

Abstract

While our research team was originally commissioned to conduct a school health needs assessment in a small rural town in the Midwestern United States, we came across an environmental injustice in the process. Like other small towns in the area, this one struggles with economic and educational achievement, offering its residents sufficient and desirable employment opportunities, and in general creating and maintaining a town that is perceived as desirable for all generations who reside there. But the town was also the site of a zinc smelter that closed down in the mid-1980s. Since then, the site of the former smelter has been declared an EPA Superfund site. Materials from the smelter (cinder blocks, fill dirt, etc.) were widely distributed to community members for use in residential construction projects after the smelter closed down, disregarding possible contamination of these materials and the corresponding potential health hazards this posed for residents. While EPA soil sampling did find several residential yards with elevated lead levels that were attributed to materials from the former smelter, community members’ accounts of EPA interactions suggest that health hazards were downplayed. Our team feels that the scope of testing and the way and extent health hazards have been communicated to community members leaves much to be desired. At the same time, we face a dilemma about next steps if and when community members signal that they don’t want to pursue questions of environmental injustice.