US EPA confronts chemical plants’ deadly air pollution
After nearly two decades, the US Government has finalised long-awaited new limits on toxic air pollution from chemical manufacturing plants, affecting operations at 218 facilities, many of them concentrated along the lower Mississippi River’s “Cancer Alley” (an 137-km-long stretch of chemical manufacturing plants along the lower Mississippi River, populated largely by Black communities) and the Texas Gulf Coast. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced the new regulation, under the Clean Air Act, on April 9, 2024.