On May 29, the South Baltimore Community Land Trust filed a civil rights complaint with the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The complaint charges the Baltimore City Department of Public Works with failing to mitigate the heavy environmental impact of waste infrastructure on South Baltimore’s predominantly Black and brown communities. At the center of the complaint is the WIN Waste incinerator (formerly BRESCO), that ominous unwelcome sign that towers over Westport. The incinerator burns 2,250 tons of trash each day, and has burned for the past 38 years. Dark smoke emitting from its stack accounts for a staggering third of Baltimore’s industrial air pollution.
Incineration should concern all residents of Baltimore, but organizers are right that it disproportionately harms residents of color, who are twice as likely as white residents to develop cancer from toxic exposure and suffer some of the highest asthma hospitalization rates in the United States. This stark disparity maps onto others: the same land use policies that made Baltimore the birthplace of American apartheid ensured that waste infrastructure was overwhelmingly concentrated in the city’s Black and immigrant neighborhoods.
As scholars with years of research and teaching experience in South Baltimore, we know this story well. The civil rights complaint brings into focus a long history of environmental discrimination. The prehistory of WIN Waste, in particular, underscores that these inequities are by design. It also suggests that we are at a crossroads; the city can continue down this detrimental path, or invest today in equitable change.
Baltimore was also at a crossroads in the 1960s and 1970s, when the city was facing a serious waste crisis. The rise of throwaway consumer culture meant that city households were discarding much more trash than ever before. But landfills were nearing capacity, as were the two incinerators already at work in Baltimore: one off Pulaski Highway, and another aging facility to the south near Cherry Hill. Desperate for a solution, officials set about building a third incinerator, hiring an engineering firm to help vet suitable locations.
Consultants were clear that this need was best met in North Baltimore and recommended several sites there, including one north of Cold Spring Lane and west of the Jones Falls Expressway, and another north of Union Avenue in Hampden. Located near white and affluent neighborhoods, each site was met with resistance. News of the Union Avenue proposal in particular brought 700 residents of Hampden and Woodberry to protest at a Board of Estimates meeting in 1962. Many came on chartered buses plastered with signs that read “Keep Hampden From Becoming City Dump.” As one resident demanded, “Please don’t degrade us.”
Mayor J. Harold Grady acquiesced that very day.
Officials shifted their attention to the South Baltimore peninsula, and they met resistance once again. Justly so, as residents had been treated as the city’s dumping ground for generations. Hazardous waste incinerators, city dumps, industrial landfills, and other noxious infrastructures have been squeezed on this periphery for some 200 years, securing public health uptown while those south of the Patapsco River suffer respiratory disease at remarkably high rates.
It was no surprise that the city persisted in trying to site an incinerator here, eventually proposing a new facility just west of Brooklyn in partnership with Baltimore County. When that effort failed in 1972, a highly unusual opportunity emerged to build an experimental waste facility in majority-Black Westport: the immediate antecedent to the BRESCO incinerator.
The opportunity was unusual for many reasons. First: it was proposed by Monsanto, an agrochemical giant with limited experience in waste management, though this did not stop the company from receiving $16 million in public funds to spearhead the facility. Second: Monsanto proposed to disappear waste through pyrolysis, an unproven technology designed to convert trash into combustible gas by heating it in oxygen-free kilns. “Urban prophets” sold the plant as an “environmental dream” based on a pilot project in St. Louis, Missouri, that processed 35 tons of solid waste per day.
Few suspected (though many should have) that scaling up to 1,000 tons per day would be an environmental nightmare, complete with clogged conveyor belts, a few explosions, a build-up of carbon monoxide so extreme that it posed severe threats to waste workers, and one embarrassing episode when garbage fused into a single solid mass that workers needed power tools to break. The plant rarely worked for more than two weeks at a time, and residents complained of loud noises, pervasive smoke, and noxious odors. Within a few short years the whole affair had left the city short on funds and quite humiliated.
Enter the incinerator formerly known as BRESCO, proposed on the ashes of the failed pyrolysis plant in 1981. It was supposed to provide a happy ending after two decades of false starts. Officials were determined to save face. That year, they visited the Westport Community Association to present their plans and found robust, informed resistance — as they had on the north side. But instead of meaningfully responding to their concerns, officials dismissed locals as ill-informed, unable to “make the distinction between a technology that is experimental and terribly risky,” like pyrolysis, “and one that is highly refined and mature,” like incineration.
We doubt this very much. People in South Baltimore know more about waste management than most, as they have shouldered its burdens for generations. What is clear from this short history is that Baltimore would rather site “experimental and terribly risky” projects in working-class communities of color than burden privileged northern neighbors with unseemly infrastructure.
This constitutes discrimination.
And it has costs: as the new Title VI complaint observes, “the BRESCO incinerator contributes a substantial amount of pollution to the cumulative pollution burden borne by residents” of South Baltimore, who live near 70 stationary sources of industrial air pollution including a medical waste incinerator, a landfill, and a coal transfer station. Pollutants released by these facilities pose serious risks to local residents’ wellbeing. Complainants make clear that the city has experimented with the health of its most vulnerable residents for far too long. And they ask officials to make good on their promise to lead a just transition toward zero waste.
To date, the Department of Public Works has failed to meet this vital challenge. They have even said as much, acknowledging at a City Council budget hearing that they have not committed serious funds to support a timely shift to zero waste alternatives like compost — and indeed are on pace to increase investments in incineration.
If the prehistory of the WIN Waste incinerator teaches anything, it is that doubling down on a failed experiment is a sure bet against Baltimore. Especially when, as complainants remind us, real alternatives are underway. With EPA support, plans are afoot to pursue new initiatives for environmental justice, modernize the city’s water infrastructure, and to develop a solar-powered, scalable composting facility for Baltimore’s urban organic waste.
We can develop urban infrastructure that meets municipal needs while also honoring residents’ wishes to protect both their health and the environment. We can build paths toward a future that does not “degrade” the southern neighborhoods. The complaint is an affirmation of these truths, and a revelation of the pasts that brought us to this precipice. We hope city leaders will recognize this complaint for the gift it is: an invitation.
Chloe Ahmann is a professor of anthropology at Cornell and the author of Futures after Progress: Hope and Doubt in Late Industrial Baltimore. Until 2012, she worked as a public school teacher in South Baltimore.
Anand Pandian is a professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University and a curator of the Baltimore-based Ecological Design Collective. He lives with his family in the city of Baltimore.