We fully agree with the Scranton Times Editorial Board that if the Wolf administration truly is serious about environmental justice, it will review and reverse its unwarranted permit approval for the Keystone Landfill expansion, a project that perfectly describes what the new Environmental Justice Office has been created to prevent.
Dunmore is in an Environmental Justice Area. FOL has participated on may EJ calls with the DEP over the past several years, providing our input on the ineffectiveness of their current efforts and how they could be improved.
Why did Governor Wolf wait until after the DEP approved a 50 year landfill expansion in an Environmental Justice Area to establish a new Office of Environmental Justice? Why did he also wait until after the expansion was approved to decide to test for Radium in leachate, something FOL pointed out with others for years? We hope this isn't another NEPA case of too little, too late.
https://www.thetimes-tribune.com/tncms/auth/return/...
Environmental justice skips over Keystone
BY THE EDITORIAL BOARD
It’s not by accident that heavily polluting enterprises tend to be located near poor communities that don’t have the resources to fight against them. And Pennsylvania has a long pattern of allowing those enterprises to locate or expand atop previously polluted sites, such as strip mines.
So Gov. Tom Wolf is correct in trying to mitigate the effects of that unfairly distributed pollution burden, with a recent executive order establishing a permanent Office of Environmental Justice.
“My administration is committed to working ... to strengthen our efforts to ensure environmental justice for all Pennsylvanians,” Wolf said while signing the order.
“Many Pennsylvania communities have been disproportionately harmed by pollution, and today’s executive order ... is a first step in making sure that we have some of the tools to mitigate and prevent it from happening in the future,” said Department of Environmental Protection Secretary Patrick McDonnell.
According to the DEP, “environmental justice embodies the principles that communities and populations should not be disproportionally exposed to adverse environmental impacts.”
The new office clearly will focus on mitigating the existing effects of concentrated industrial pollution within low-income communities, and preventing those concentrations in the future.
But DEP never has needed a dedicated office of environmental justice to achieve those goals. While announcing the grand principles behind the office, for example, McDonnell’s agency has signed off on the 40-year expansion of the sprawling, stinking Keystone Sanitary Landfill in Dunmore and Throop — a project that directly contradicts those stated principles and goals and imposes substantial pollution harms on a wide swath of Lackawanna County.
Allowing the landfill to accept another 100 million tons or so of mostly out-of-state garbage clearly constitutes a community being “disproportionately harmed by pollution,” the very circumstance that McDonnell condemned in his statement about the new office.
If the Wolf administration truly is serious about environmental justice, it will review and reverse its unwarranted permit approval for the Keystone Landfill expansion, a project that perfectly describes what the new Environmental Justice Office has been created to prevent.