Environmental Justice/Injustice and SCAQMD’s Dry-Cleaners Initiative

This paper presents an analysis of an Environment Justice (EJ) program adopted by the South Coast Air Quality Management District (AQMD) as a part of its regulation to phase out a toxic chemical used by dry cleaners. AQMD has provided financial incentives to switch early, and establishments in EJ neighborhoods are given priority. Despite this pro-EJ policy, an analysis of available data shows that dry cleaners in low-income, predominantly minority and EJ designated areas are less likely to be an early adopter of green technologies, and this finding holds even after accounting for firm and market characteristics. Introduction Environment Justice (EJ) has become a major concern within the environment arena. At its core, EJ is concerned with the unequal burden on socially and economically disadvantaged communities and the government’s role in producing the inequality. Since the seminal and influential publications by the United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice (1987) and Robert Bullard (1990), there has been a growing body of increasingly sophisticated research documenting the pervasive socioeconomic inequality in the distribution of environmental hazards from stationary and mobile sources (Anderton, et al., 1994; Bowen, 2000; Oakes, et al. 1994; Bullard et al., 2007; Houston, et al. 2004; Morello-Frosch and Lopez 2006; Pastor et al. 2006; Rinquist 2005). The EJ movement has focused on “environmental racism” and has been 1 The author wants to acknowledge the invaluable support provided by Dr. Ward Thomas, who generously allowed me to use his data on dry cleaners, SCAQMD for providing additional information, and UCLA’s Luskin Center for