Taking on Petrochemical Giants

This past August, a top federal official announced that the permit for a massive petrochemical complex in St. James Parish, Louisiana would be suspended until the US Army Corps conducts an environmental review of the facility and its impact on nearby communities. When Sharon Lavigne heard the news, she “thanked God” that her activism was paying off. Finally, someone in the government was listening.

Lavigne has been leading an international campaign to stop the so-called Sunshine Project proposed by the Taiwanese corporation Formosa Plastics, which is notorious for damaging environments and communities around the world. The $9.4 billion project comprises a 14-plant complex that would turn surplus gas from fracking operations in the US into plastic, mostly of the single-use kind used for packaging. By some estimates, the complex would emit 800 tons of air pollution each year, doubling toxic air emissions in St. James Parish, which already bears an oversized burden from America’s petrochemical industry.

Construction work on the project has been on hold since November 2020 when the Army Corps agreed to reconsider its permit for the project in the parish’s Welcome neighborhood, where Lavigne lives. “The new review is going to take about two years; that’s good for us because we are putting them on hold, we are stalling them,” she says. “We don’t want any more polluting companies to come in here.”

Located alongside the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, St. James Parish sits in a region that has come to be known as “Cancer Alley” or “Death Ally” for the high concentration of industrial pollution from the some 200 petrochemical plants that lie along an 80-mile stretch of the river. Cancer rates in the parish, which is home to mostly low-income, African American communities, are 50 times higher than the national average.

Lavigne, a former special education teacher, started RISE St. James, a faith-based environmental justice group, with her neighbors in 2018 after she learned that local officials had given two more petrochemical companies approval to set up massive operations in her community — Formosa, and the Chinese company Wanhua. The St. James Parish Council had even rezoned a residential area in order to allow Wanhua’s $1.25-billion plastics manufacturing facility to be built in close proximity to homes.

“I knew I had to do something to stop this,” Lavigne says. “I was told nothing could be done [about these projects] because the government had approved it. But I didn’t care.” So, she and other RISE St. James volunteers went knocking on doors, organized protests, and hosted town-hall meetings with experts to educate community members about the environmental and health risks of these projects. They produced reports, wrote op-eds in local papers, and built coalitions with other local and national environmental and justice groups.

Learn more about this Earth Island project at: www.stopformosa.org

In September 2019, faced with growing opposition, Wanhua canceled its project. Five months later, RISE St. James and several other groups, including Louisiana Bucket Brigade and the Center for Biological Diversity, challenged the Formosa project in federal court. That suit resulted in the Army Corps suspending its original, flawed permit, which would have allowed Formosa to fill in wetlands on the more than 2,300-acre site along the Mississippi River.

In June this year, Lavigne was honored with a Goldman Environmental Prize — the environmental movement’s biggest annual award — for helping stop the Wanhua project and for her ongoing work against Formosa and other polluting projects proposed for the region. RISE St. James now has its sight trained on South Louisiana Methanol LP’s $2.2 billion methanol plant. “It’s trying to set up a plant right next to the only park we have in the district,” Lavigne says. “We are not going to let that happen.”