The Trump administration is halting a high-profile Biden-era bid to confront pollution exposure in the Louisiana region often dubbed “Cancer Alley.”
A newly filed court document indicates that EPA will drop an enforcement lawsuit brought two years ago against a Louisiana chemical company on the grounds that its releases of a compound called chloroprene posed an imminent danger to residents of the predominantly Black community around the synthetic rubber plant.
Now, all sides in the Clean Air Act suit against Denka Performance Elastomer intend to file a “stipulation of dismissal,” U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier of the Eastern District of Louisiana wrote in a summary of a Wednesday conference call with attorneys in the case.
EPA press aides referred questions Friday to the Justice Department, where spokespersons did not reply to emails seeking comment on the government’s plans. But in a statement, Denka said the dismissal agreement marks “a long-overdue and appropriate end to a case lacking scientific and legal merit from the start.”
It also offers a telling reminder of the reversal of EPA’s priorities following President Donald Trump’s election last November. In his first two days in office, Trump scrapped executive orders dating back to the 1990s that had sought to prod federal agencies to reduce disparities in pollution exposure that generally hit people of color and low-income communities harder.
Even before he took office, as POLITICO’s E&E News reported last month, Denka attorneys had sought to learn whether his incoming administration intended to pursue the case; in recent days, The New York Times and other outlets cited unnamed sources saying the decision had been made to drop it.
In Friday’s statement, the company thanked the Trump administration, as well as Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican, who has sided with the firm in a related battle over the Biden administration’s accelerated timetable for bringing the facility into compliance with a broader set of chemical industry air regulations tightened last year.
The Denka plant is the United States’ only manufacturer of neoprene, used in products ranging from wet suits to rubber hoses. Chloroprene, which EPA classifies as a likely carcinogen, is used in making neoprene.
Under former President Joe Biden, the agency had brought the suit in early 2023, alleging that the plant’s emissions posed an unacceptably high cancer risk to residents and students in a nearby elementary school in St. John the Baptist Parish.
Invoking rarely used authority, the suit sought court action to immediately eliminate the alleged peril. In a news release, then-EPA Administrator Michael Regan said he was delivering on a promise to take “strong action to protect the health and safety of families.”
The suit was part of a broader Biden administration campaign to deal with health dangers along the heavily industrialized Mississippi River corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans that has become a byword for angst over environmental inequities and the government’s failure to confront them.
Japan-based Denka, which accused the Biden administration of following a “politically motivated strategy” and relying on faulty science, said it had spent some $35 million to slash chloroprene releases by 85 percent following an earlier deal with state regulators.
Those emissions totaled about 13 tons in 2023, the last year for which numbers are currently available from EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory. Denka expects them to be less than 10 tons in 2024, Jason Hutt, a Bracewell attorney who is part of the company’s legal team, said in a recent interview.
In a filing last September, however, EPA attorneys wrote that chloroprene concentrations in communities surrounding the plant remained “multiples higher” than a lifetime cancer risk inhalation threshold of 0.2 micrograms per cubic meter of air.
Despite EPA’s initial call for swift action, trial in the case was set to start only next month. The local school board has meanwhile voted to close the elementary school later this year.
