Cancer Alley
Cancer Alley is the regional nickname given to an stretch of land along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, in the River Parishes of Louisiana, which contains over 200 petrochemical plants and refineries. As of 2012, this area accounted for 25% of the petrochemical production in the United States. By the 1970s the EPA documented serious water and air pollution. Environmentalists consider the region a sacrifice zone where rates of cancer caused by air pollution exceed the federal government's own limits of acceptable risk.
Community leaders such as Sharon Lavigne have led the charge in protesting the expansion of the petrochemical industry in Cancer Alley, as well as addressing the associated racial and economic disparities.
Cancer Alley in a larger sense extends further west along the Gulf Coast into Texas to the area of Freeport, Texas.
History
Following an oil and gas boom around the time of World War II, a number of refineries spawned along the Mississippi River near the Gulf Coast. Many of these facilities were previously located in major population centers, such as Baton Rouge and New Orleans, but during the 1950s, many sought to migrate to less densely populated places. Many relocated to the small communities along the river between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, often located on former plantation sites adjacent to communities with significant or majority African American populations.By the 1970s, the area had a proliferation of plants producing vinyl chloride, nitrogen fertilizers, and chlorine. By the 1970s, serious air pollution and water pollution was noted by federal agencies. An EPA report found 66 pollutants in New Orleans drinking water, and 31 lethal chemicals in the air of Plaquemine. In 1976, Coast Guard divers retrieving sediment samples from a bayou suffered second-degree burns on their hands. By the early 1980s, residents in the neighborhood of Good Hope had grown accustomed to regular fires at a local oil refinery, and developed their own informal evacuation plans for their occurrences. Despite the known problems with pollution, the petrochemical industry in the area continued unabated, and even continued expanding. In the early 1980s, an oil refinery purchased the land of Good Hope for expansion.
Beginning in the 1980s, locals also perceived certain species of plants and animals becoming less common. By 1988, locals began referring to an area in Chalmette in St. Bernard Parish as "Cancer Alley". The "alley" later grew to encompass an eighty-five-mile stretch along the Mississippi River stretching from New Orleans to Baton Rouge and includes the parishes of East Baton Rouge, West Baton Rouge, Iberville, Ascension, St. James, St. John the Baptist, St. Charles, Jefferson, Orleans, St. Bernard, and Plaquemines.
Industrial plants emitting toxic waste in Louisiana continued to proliferate in the 21st century. According to EPA data, the number of industrial plants in Louisiana that reported their toxic releases grew from 255 to 320 from 1988 to 2017, an increase of 25%, even as the number of such plants nationwide dropped by 16% over that period.
Per a 2003 study that surveyed 11 plants in St. James Parish, researchers found that the plants employed between 4.9% and 19.4% African Americans, which is low in comparison to the overall population of the county.
In 1969, DuPont opened a plant to manufacture the chemical chloroprene, the main ingredient in neoprene, in Reserve, Louisiana on the border with LaPlace, Louisiana. The plant was sold in 2015 to Japanese chemical company Denka. The area immediately adjacent to the Denka/DuPont neoprene plant in St. John the Baptist Parish has been recognized by the EPA as having a likelihood of its residents getting cancer from air pollution over 700 times the national average. According to EPA, it emits 99% of the nation's chloroprene pollution. EPA opened civil rights investigations over this pollution from Cancer Alley. On March 7, 2025, the Justice Department announced it was dropping the federal case against Denka's Louisiana elastomer plant, which the Biden administration had sued over alleged increased cancer risks in the local, mostly Black community. The DOJ linked the withdrawal to Trump's policy of ending federal DEI initiatives.
Community organizing
In 1996, Shintech Inc. announced that they would be creating three new polyvinyl chloride manufacturing plants in Convent, a small majority Black community that serves as the parish seat of St. James Parish. The state of Louisiana issued Shintech permits to proceed with the project in 1997, despite their acknowledgement that these locations would be adding 623,000 pounds of pollutants to the air annually. The residents of Convent formed a coalition called St. James Citizens for the Environment that drew the attention of outside legal groups including the Tulane University Environmental Law Clinic and the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund. In 1998, after considerable pressure and lobbying, Shintech withdrew its project plans.In 1992, the Taiwanese-owned Formosa Plastics Corporation proposed to build a $700 million rayon and pulp processing plant in Wallace, a small majority Black community in St. John the Baptist Parish. This plant would have been the world's largest of its kind if completed, and was expected to create 5,000 jobs. The 750 residents of the town waged a legal battle and eventually won forcing Formosa to build their plant elsewhere.
In 2018, the Formosa Plastics Corporation proposed the Sunshine Project, a $9.4 billion industrial complex to be located on the west bank of St. James Parish that is estimated to become the petrochemical and plastics project with the single greatest environmental detriment, at an estimated 13,628,086 tons of greenhouse gas emissions yearly. The proposed complex would span 2,500 acres and will be situated one mile from an elementary school, On January 15, 2020, RISE St. James, a faith-based grassroots organization of St. James Parish community members, in conjunction with the nonprofit conservation organization Center for Biological Diversity, the grassroots organization Louisiana Bucket Brigade, and the nonprofit Healthy Gulf, sued the Trump administration for permitting Formosa Plastics' proposed petrochemical complex. The lawsuit sought to invalidate the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' fast-tracked Clean Water Act permits that the Corps issued the prior year. It had come to light that independent archaeologists that Formosa Plastics hired had discovered that enslaved people were buried in unmarked graves beneath the 2,300-acre site that Formosa planned to develop their plastics complex on. Citing violation of federal laws in the approval of destroying wetlands, the region's first and quickly dwindling line of defense against progressively-intensifying natural disasters, as well as the failure to protect the water, air, and health of the surrounding communities, and the violation of the National Historic Preservation Act in failing to protect the burial grounds of enslaved people, the lawsuit demanded the rescinding of the permits issued in September 2019 as well as the conducting of a full environmental impact study. On November 4, 2020, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced its plans to suspend its permit for the Sunshine Project.
The economic stimulation and job creation that is promised with the proposal of each new plant in the area has never been fulfilled, while a tiny minority of full-time industry jobs are filled by community members who bear the brunt of the pollution burden – for example, in St. Gabriel of Iberville Parish where there are now 30 large petrochemical plants within a 10-mile radius, only 9% of the full-time industry jobs in the city are held by local residents, and at least one in four residents live in poverty. The promised economic prosperity in these major investments has yet to be delivered, but continues to be a cited reason for the continued approval of petrochemical permits.
Criticism
The EPA, in both 2016 and 2020, reported that those residing in Cancer Alley are exposed to more than 10 times “the level of health risk from hazardous air pollutants” than other residents in the state. Human Rights Watch reviewed data from 12 fossil fuel and petrochemical plants operating in the Cancer Alley area from October 2020 to November 2023. Out of these 12 facilities, only one of them was “reported in compliance with all three federal laws” in the 3-year observational period. Only 2 of these facilities “were in compliance with the Clean Water Act” as well.On January 27, 2021, President Joe Biden signed an executive order regarding environmental justice and specifically cited Cancer Alley as a hard-hit area. Louisiana Chemical Association President Greg Bowser responded to President Biden's remarks on the region, refuting claims that residents of the industrial corridor have a higher risk of developing cancer in multiple articles. Furthermore, he cited Louisiana Tumor Registry data to support his claims. The LTR claims that there has not been an increase in cancer deaths connected to industrial pollution.
On March 2, 2021, the United Nations Human Rights Committee discussed the continued industrial projects along the Mississippi River in Louisiana. The UN council on contemporary racism strongly condemned what they defined as environmental racism in their discussion with experts and other UN officials:
This form of environmental racism poses serious and disproportionate threats to the enjoyment of several human rights of its largely African American residents, including the right to equality and non-discrimination, the right to life, the right to health, right to an adequate standard of living and cultural rights.The sentiments stated by environmental activists were echoed by the Human Rights Commission.
As of 2019 activists and locals have disputed the conclusions of the Louisiana Tumor Registry asserting the tracts used cover large areas and the data does not allow for specific locations adjacent to chemical plants to be analyzed individually. They also posited that the data may be incomplete as those who died during the COVID-19 pandemic who also had cancer might not be included. In 2008, Louisiana health officials were unable to release the specific cases and data because of medical privacy laws.