Abstract
Research addressing “environmental equity” and “environmental racism” claims that facilities for treatment, storage, and disposal of hazardous wastes (TSDFs) are located disproportionately in minority areas. In the first comprehensive study of TSDFs to use census tract-level data, we find no nationally consistent and statistically significant differences between the racial or ethnic composition of tracts which contain commercial TSDFs and those which do not. TSDFs are more likely to be found in tracts with Hispanic groups, primarily in regions with the greatest percentage of Hispanics. Different geographic units of analysis elaborate on, but are consistent with, these results.
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This research was conducted at the Social and Demographic Research Institute (SADRI) at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and was supported by a grant from Waste Management Incorporated, as sponsored by the Institute for Chemical Waste Management, to the Northeast Regional Public Health Center. The grantor bears no responsibility for the findings reported here. All authors are members of SADRI. We are deeply indebted for the capable assistance of Dee Weber and Bill Thompson, along with the consultation of Peter Rossi and Ed Calabrese. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. This is a revision of a paper written for the 1994 meetings of the Population Association of America. Data presented in this paper were provided in part by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research.
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Anderton, D.L., Anderson, A.B., Oakes, J.M. et al. Environmental Equity: The Demographics of Dumping. Demography 31, 229–248 (1994). https://doi.org/10.2307/2061884
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/2061884