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The Sampson County landfill can be smelled before seen. This olfactory indicator points toward the sensory scale of these pungent emissions but also toward the geographic scope: this landfill receives waste from as far away as Orange County (the state's most expensive property/tax base), among dozens of other distant counties, making this "hazardous site" a lesson in realizing impact beyond the immediate locale. So when we answer the question, "What is this hazard?" we must think not only about the landfill as a thing in itself but as a set of economic and political relations of capital and the transit of other peoples' trash, into this lower-income, rural, predominantly African-American neighborhood. In this way, 'thinking with a landfill' (like this one in Sampson County) enables us to analyze wider sets of relationships, NIMBY-ist policymaking, consumerism, waste management, and the racialized spatial politics that enable Sampson County to be the recipient of trash from all over the state. At the same time we think spatially and in transit, we can think historically to (a) inquire about the DEQ policies that enable this kind of waste management system; and (b) the emergent "solutions" in the green energy sector that propose to capture the landfill's methane in order to render the stench productive for the future -- that is, to enable more consumption, by turning garbage into gas. As such, the idea of "hazard" can expand beyond the site itself - impactful and affective as that site might be - to examine the uneven relations of exchange and capitalist-driven values of productivity that further entrench infrastructures such as these. [This offers a conceptual corrollary to thinking, as well, about the entrenchment of CAFOs for "green" biogas development, as we address elsewhere in the platform].

Danielle Koonce in an Opinion piece in the Fayetteville Observer, states...

"And it’s not just household garbage coming in — chemical waste and coal ash has also been disposed of in the Sampson County landfill."

"We listened to community members share how they can no longer garden or enjoy the outdoors due to the thick odor and fumes from the landfill."

"We learned that the landfill receives trash from around the state, from as far away as New York City, and even trash that comes in on ship-barges through Wilmington."

While Bryan Wuester, manager for the Sampson County Landfill states in the Sampson Independent...

"The Sampson landfill accepts waste from North Carolina only, about 5,450 tons from 16 different counties a day."

"The landfill accepts three kinds of waste: construction and demolition materials, solid waste and special waste, which are byproducts of industry. No coal ash comes into the Sampson facility..."

These are two different stories of the landfill coming from two different stakeholders, one in which needs the landfill to be in operation for a job and the other a concerned citizen worried about the disproportional impacts her community faces. While Danielle Koonce listens to the realities of the community members located around the landfill who express concern and worry, the landfill manager denies these realities and insists they are not true. This is not only invaliding to the community members who are fighting to get their voices heard but further embeds environmental injustice into the community.  

• Blackburn, Jim, and Mae Wu. “Case Study: Voluntary Agreements in Environmental Management at Formosa Plastics.” Environmental Quality Management 8, no. 1 (1998): 19–28. https://doi.org/10/cczx2r. 
• Mickenberg, Julia L., and Philip Nel. “Radical Children’s Literature Now!” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 36, no. 4 (2011): 445–73. https://doi.org/10.1353/chq.2011.0040.
• Peñalver, Elena Alcalde, and Alexandra Santamaría Urbieta. “Whose Fault Is It? Students’ Perceptions towards the American Financial System through an English for Specific Purposes Class.” Porta Linguarum: Revista Internacional de Didáctica de Las Lenguas Extranjeras, no. 37 (2022): 27–45.
• Schütz, Tim. "Visualizing Taiwan's Formosa Plastics." Interactions 28, no. 4 (2021): 50-55.
• Tran, Dalena. “A Comparative Study of Women Environmental Defenders’ Antiviolent Success Strategies.” Geoforum 126 (November 1, 2021): 126–38. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.07.024.
• Tubilewicz, Czeslaw. “Foreign Capital and US States’ Contested Strategies of Internationalisation: A Constructivist Analysis.” Contemporary Politics 0, no. 0 (November 10, 2021): 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569775.2021.2001156.

https://www.victoriaadvocate.com/counties/calhoun/point-comfort-forged-…

tbd

• San Antonio Bay Estuarine Waterkeepers
• Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ)
• NurdlePatrol

See news coverage timeline.

Following growing  resistance against Formosa in Taiwan, the company decided to expand to Texas in the early 1980s (see Elkind 1989 and Tubilewicz 2021)

In 2017, Diane Wilson, Dale Jurasek, and Ronnie Hamrick (another former wastewater manager) – organized as the Calhoun County Waterkeepers – filed a landmark citizens lawsuit against Formosa, bringing literally buckets of evidence forward, supporting allegations of rampant and illegal discharge of plastic pellets and other pollutants into Lavaca Bay from Formosa’s Calhoun County plant. The case was led by Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, which describes the outcome as the largest settlement of a Clean Water Act suit filed by private individuals (Berti Suman & Schade 2021). 

Legal scholars Suman and Schade (2021) argue that the case is unique due to the voluntary collection and presentation of a large quantity of evidence collected over an extended period of time that was accepted by both the judge and defendants without objections since neither the defendant nor “competent authorities” could provide competing evidence. The Waterkeepers collection and presentation of pollution data thus filled an “enforcement gap.” While noting the peculiarities of the US legal system that enables citizen lawsuits, Suman and Schade also argue that the Waterkeeper’s case could inspire monitoring activities in environmental justice communities around the world, helping to shift how citizen science can be used as evidence. 

The Waterkeepers legal win demonstrates the potential of law, and particularly citizens suits, in environmental governance, countering long-running cynicism about the role of the law and state writ large in redressing problems largely of their own making. It also, however, suggests that citizens suits have special power today, precisely because they are both in and slightly beyond the bounds of law, of and beyond the state. Through citizens suits, non-state actors can use state mechanisms to hold the state to account for failing to do its job. This depends, however, on sustained data collection, curation and presentation, and the infrastructure needed to support this. There are thus long backstories that need to be built – bodies of evidence, analysis and interpretation that can be brought to bear in work to turn “the state” around.

In the 1990s, a shift supervisor and wastewater manager at Formosa Plastics, Dale Jurasek, found himself suffering from sores that no doctor in Calhoun County could explain. Only months later, after several visits to a regional medical center associated with the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration, did he learn that the reasons were chemicals he was exposed to at the Formosa plant where he worked, causing irreparable damage to his nervous system. Jurasek’s experience exhibits what can be called divisible health care, which runs in a tangled parallel with divisible governance. It is an experience painfully familiar to many people with toxic exposures: seeking health care itself becomes toxic because established health systems can’t register the strange, sometimes highly individualized, effects of toxic harms (Morgan and Fortun; Fortun 2011).

Angry that Formosa harmed his health and likely that of many other workers, Jurasek then contacted the US EPA and FBI as a whistleblower, providing undercover information about worker safety and failed environmental protections at the Calhoun County Formosa plant (Gibbons 2019). After several years of work on the case, however, the FBI dropped it. Jurasek speculates that this was because the FBI’s attention was diverted by a big case against Koch Industries. Again, capacity to govern environmental health was inadequate. 

Jursaek stayed angry. He also learned about Diane Wilson, and in 2008 reached out for a meeting – at a meeting place out of town so they wouldn’t be recognized by neighbors. The result was a coalition between Formosa plant workers and a local shrimp fisher that has had staying power, bringing different perspectives on Formosas together. 

In 2017, Diane Wilson, Dale Jurasek, and Ronnie Hamrick (another former wastewater manager) – organized as the Calhoun County Waterkeepers – filed a landmark citizens lawsuit against Formosa, bringing literally buckets of evidence forward, supporting allegations of rampant and illegal discharge of plastic pellets and other pollutants into Lavaca Bay from Formosa’s Calhoun County plant. The case was led by Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, which describes the outcome as the largest settlement of a Clean Water Act suit filed by private individuals (Berti Suman & Schade 2021).