Traveling the Plastic Coast
A rented truck, a huge load of plastic nurdles and a warning to Louisiana
By Julie Teel Simmonds and Delia Ridge Creamer
Formosa Plastics polluted Texas waterways with plastic pellets produced by its Point Comfort petrochemical complex for years, recently settling a Clean Water Act lawsuit in which it had been found liable for $50 million. Now the company wants to build an even bigger plant along the Mississippi River in St. James Parish, Louisiana.
Rise St. James, the Louisiana Bucket Brigade and other local groups have been fighting to stop the plant from being built in an area that already has so much industrial pollution it’s known as Cancer Alley. They want Louisiana officials to understand the threat the petrochemical buildout poses and what Formosa did to neighboring Texas.
We (a Center for Biological Diversity attorney and political organizer) are on a road trip to pick up a truckload of Formosa’s plastic pollution, which lead plaintiff Diane Wilson and the San Antonio Bay Estuarine Waterkeeper collected as evidence for their successful case against Formosa, and drive it to Louisiana.
These plastic pellets, also known as nurdles, will be a centerpiece of NURDLEFEST 2019, an event this week outside the Baton Rouge office of the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, which is the agency responsible for issuing permits for Formosa’s proposed project.
Join us as we journey along the Plastic Coast and connect the devastation Formosa brought to Texas with the threat it’s posing to Louisiana.
Day 1
SEADRIFT, TEXAS — Diane Wilson lives a few miles from a sleepy fishing town off the beaten bath on San Antonio Bay. Her decades-long quest to hold Formosa Plastics accountable for its pollution has made Port Lavaca the center of a growing national movement against increased plastic production. After a long day on the road, we were glad to bump along her dirt driveway and catch a glimpse of this warm and inspiring shrimper-turned-activist and a few of her cats waiting for us in the yard. She helped us back our truck up to an impressive stack of over 35 storage bins filled with meticulously bagged and labeled plastic-pollution evidence.
For years Diane watched plastic pollution discharged from Formosa’s Point Comfort plant accumulate in Cox Creek and Lavaca Bay, waters she fished for decades and still glides her kayak through. The company ignored her calls to do something and her requests for a meeting. Texas regulators wouldn’t do anything more than slap this massive multinational corporation on the wrist.
Not sure to what end, Diane and her allies started to collect and document those plastic pellets and powders. For more than three years, several days a week, they visited local waterways to bag and tag that evidence. In 2017, with the help of lawyers from Texas Rural Legal Aid, they filed their Clean Water Act lawsuit.
Now with the historic settlement, the largest of its kind, all of the painstakingly collected evidence is stored in the barn-style garage on Diane’s rural property in Seadrift. We had heard stories about it and seen photos, but they didn’t prepare us for just how much there was, and it was only a fraction of the total discharges. Nurdles mixed with sand and seagrass, all the perfect size and appearance to be mistaken for food by the fish and wildlife of San Antonio Bay and its estuaries.
We worked together to load our rented truck with all that plastic and asked Diane how she felt to see it go. She said she was glad to get the space back, but that the work to hold Formosa to its commitments and restore the health of her beloved creeks, bays and estuaries has just begun.
Besides, she noted, she’s glad her new allies in Louisiana can make use of it. She hopes they have better luck keeping Formosa out of St. James than she had keeping them from her once-vibrant fishing community. We hope that by bringing this tangible proof of Formosa’s threat to Louisiana, the state will prioritize the health of its people, waterways and seafood industry over this dangerous, polluting industry.
Day 2
SEADRIFT, TEXAS to BATON ROUGE, LA — We woke up today to the sound of roosters crowing and thinking about taking Diane’s plastic haul on the road toward Sharon Lavigne. The longtime St. James Parish resident organized her community into RISE St. James to fight Formosa’s designs on her hometown. Between Diane and Sharon, the movement we’re supporting is led by some incredibly brave and frankly badass women. Diane, also an anti-war activist who has engaged in over 30 hunger strikes, was once appropriately recognized by Mother Jones as “Hellraiser of the Month.”
Diane has watched the industry her family has been a part of for four generations collapse as the petrochemical industry moved in. Sharon has seen friends and family struck down by illness and cancer in her already heavily-industrialized parish. We’ve heard both independently say that they didn’t have a choice, they felt a calling to fight for the places and people they love.
Sharon has become a high-profile media figure over the past year as journalists investigate Cancer Alley and health problems caused by industrial polluters. As dirty and dangerous as her air already is, the Formosa project would more than double the toxic air pollution she’s breathing, making this truly an issue of life and death for her community.
After a quick stop for an old fashioned at the Donut Palace in Port Lavaca, we drove by Formosa’s Point Comfort facility. As we passed by Gate 3, we realized that we should never again refer to these as “facilities,” when they resemble a skyline from Blade Runner. They are enormous industrial cities that completely vertically and horizontally dwarf towns like Seadrift, TX and Welcome, LA.
When Formosa finally agreed to settle the case against its Point Comfort complex last October, Sharon said, “It’s terrible what Formosa Plastics did to Texas, and we don’t want their pollution in Louisiana. Our community has suffered enough from exposure to industrial pollution. We don’t need Formosa to make things worse. Our lives matter.”
Nothing drove home the scale of the fossil-fueled petrochemical buildout and the massive pollution it can spew and discharge into local communities like seeing vast complex after complex planted in agricultural fields across rural Texas and Louisiana.
Diane Wilson’s one big regret is not fighting harder to keep Formosa out of her community in the first place. By working in coalition with Sharon, RISE St. James, and other local organizations, and building on the experience of those who have fought industrial goliaths before, we’d love nothing more than to tell Diane that this time it worked.
Day 3
We drove past Port Neches, a small refinery town in Texas that was jarred awake at 1 a.m. on Nov. 26 by window-shattering explosions from TPC Group’s petrochemical plant.
Like Formosa, TPC has a poor record of worker safety and environmental practices. The explosions spewed thousands of pounds of pollutants into the air, including hydrogen sulfide, carbon monoxide, benzene and butadiene, and forced more than 50,000 residents out of their homes. This was a solemn reminder that the risks Formosa and other petrochemical giants pose are not just to the air and water but to human health as well.
As we inched toward Baton Rouge and the rain and night began to fall, we considered the opportunity Louisiana has at this moment. The state, and in particular its Department of Environmental Quality, can reject the permits needed to build Formosa’s next big pollution machine in St. James Parish. That would be the best outcome for public health, for the environment, and for the world’s waterways and oceans, which are already filled with too much plastic pollution.
At the very least, the state’s Environmental Quality department should require the zero-plastic discharge standard Formosa begrudgingly agreed to in Texas as a result of all the plastic-pollution evidence we loaded into our van earlier this week. Louisiana should not be Formosa’s next sacrifice zone.
For good luck before we crossed the state line, we pressed a penny at a roadside Stuckey’s and put it in our back pocket. In a state that has prioritized petrochemical polluters’ revenues over public and environmental health, we’ll need all the luck we can get to stop Formosa.
Day 4
We were hoping the storm would pass swiftly over Baton Rouge, but we woke to sheets of rain falling at unforgiving angles. And then it poured for every second of Nurdlefest 2019.
Still we forged ahead, nearly 40 cold but resolute members and staff of RISE St. James, the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, Sunrise Movement, Justice and Beyond, 350 New Orleans, Sierra Club, the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) and Healthy Gulf. We wrestled up tents and tables outside the downtown offices of the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, determined to speak out for what was right, rain or no rain.
Under the gaze of curious Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality staffers, peering out at us from the warmth of their lobby, we held a press conference on the drenched lawn that featured the fearless women of RISE St. James. They made their voices heard over the billowing tents and rain while we encircled them holding up signs that read: The Sunshine Project, Committed to Polluting St. James Parish.
The message was clear: St. James has no room for Formosa. We need to build a new system that protects public health and the environment over petrochemical plants and profits.
Chilled to the bone, we moved to the Baton Rouge Unitarian Church, whose congregants opened their doors to our coalition on only a few minutes’ notice. They were welcoming, and our group fit in well. We warmed up in the gathering space of the church and were immediately fed overflowing plates from Momma’s Silver Moon café, served by Momma herself — a Baton Rouge soul-food icon.
Then we settled in for a full lineup of presentations and entertainment, including teach-ins by Jane Patton (CIEL) on the harmful lifecycle of plastics and by Kimberly Terrell (Tulane Environmental Law Clinic) on the facts we know about Formosa based on its air-permit application. There were even musical acts and a Climate Emergency-themed circus performance. Several people wanted to see and understand the nurdles.
Nurdlefest 2019 concluded with a focus on our demand to the state’s Department of Environmental Quality, calls to their office, and letters written on homemade, recycled nurdle paper. Rev. Manning, a leader of Justice and Beyond and the Coalition against Death Alley, closed the day with a powerful sermon empowering us to tell the truth and spread the story of what’s happening here in Louisiana, including the harmful and destructive petrochemical industries committing injustices against the people. He reminded us all that we’re a strong community, and no matter our faith or denomination, we’re powerful because we’re motivated by love.
If you’ve never had the experience of working in an activist or faith-based space in the Gulf, you may be surprised at how often Louisianans break into soulful song. It seemed fitting that we ended with a final delivery of “Victory Is Mine” as we worked to clean the room and retire after a long, rainy day. Although Nurdlefest 2019 hadn’t gone quite as planned, we couldn’t help but feel a renewed sense of hope.
From Texas to Louisiana, our coalition is strong, and we’re rising up to stop Formosa.
