The 1987 Report That Mapped Toxic Waste by Race

The report that changed the argument did not come from a university, a federal agency or a big environmental group. It came from a church. In 1987, the United Church of Christ's Commission for Racial Justice, a civil rights arm of a mainline Protestant denomination best known for its New England congregational roots, released a document with a blunt title: Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States. Its research director was a young organizer named Charles Lee. Lee and his collaborators took a question that had been asked in a handful of places, Afton, North Carolina, and Houston, and pushed it onto a national map. Using data on commercial hazardous waste facilities and uncontrolled toxic sites, matched to the racial and economic makeup of ZIP codes across the country, they found that race stood out as the factor most strongly associated with where the facilities were. It was a finding many residents of those neighbourhoods had always suspected. Now there was a table to point to.

In short: Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States was the first national study to show that hazardous waste sites were concentrated in communities of colour, and race predicted their location more strongly than income. Its methods were debated for years, but later studies with better tools largely confirmed the pattern, and the report became the founding document of federal environmental justice policy.

A church takes on a data problem

Why a church? The United Church of Christ had a long history in the civil rights movement, and its Commission for Racial Justice had been deeply involved in the Warren County protests of 1982, when residents of a mostly Black county in North Carolina fought a landfill for PCB-contaminated soil. Benjamin Chavis, who led the commission, had been arrested there.

Afterward, a General Accounting Office study for Congress looked at four large hazardous waste landfills in the Southeast and found that three were in mostly Black communities. That was suggestive, but four sites in one region could be dismissed as coincidence. The commission wanted to know whether the pattern held nationally.

Nobody had done that study, in part because the data was scattered. The EPA kept lists of hazardous waste facilities and of abandoned or uncontrolled toxic sites, but no one had systematically compared their locations with census data on race and income across the whole country. Lee's team did that, using the tools available in the mid-1980s: ZIP codes, the census, and statistical tests run on what were then fairly modest computers.

What the report found

The study had two parts.

The first looked at commercial hazardous waste treatment, storage and disposal facilities, the operating businesses that take in toxic waste. The researchers compared ZIP codes with such facilities to ZIP codes without them. They found that communities with these facilities had a significantly higher share of residents of colour, and that communities with the largest landfills or the most facilities had the highest shares. When they tested several variables at once, including income and home values, race was the most significant predictor of where the facilities were located.

The second part looked at uncontrolled toxic waste sites, abandoned or closed places where hazardous waste had been left, the kind of sites that the federal Superfund program was created to clean up. Here the report estimated how many Americans lived in communities with such sites and found that Black and Hispanic Americans were overrepresented. The report's widely cited estimate was that about three of every five Black and Hispanic Americans lived in a community with one or more uncontrolled toxic waste sites.

The report did not claim that every siting decision was the product of conscious bigotry. Its argument was about outcomes and patterns: whatever the mix of causes, the burden fell unequally, and race mattered more than class.

That last point was the surprise. Many people, including many environmentalists, assumed that pollution followed poverty, and that race only mattered because people of colour were more likely to be poor. The report said race mattered on its own.

The arithmetic, in plain terms

It is worth walking through what a study like this actually does, because the method is the whole argument.

Imagine every ZIP code in the country sorted into groups: those with no hazardous waste facility, those with one, those with more than one or with one of the largest landfills. For each group, the researchers calculated the average share of residents who were people of colour, along with average household income and home values. If waste facilities were placed without regard to who lived nearby, those averages should look roughly similar across the groups. They did not. The share of residents of colour climbed as the number and size of facilities climbed.

The harder question is whether race simply stands in for something else. People of colour in the 1980s were, on average, poorer than white Americans, so a pattern by race might really be a pattern by income. The researchers used a statistical technique that tested several variables at the same time to see which ones still mattered once the others were accounted for. Race held up as the strongest predictor. Income mattered too, but less.

That is the claim that made the report famous, and it is also where the arguments about method began. A statistical association is not a confession. It shows that a pattern is too strong to be chance and that it is not explained away by the other variables measured. It cannot by itself show why each facility ended up where it did. For that, researchers later went back and traced individual siting decisions, which is slower work.

Superfund, Love Canal and a broader question

The second half of the report connected the race question to the country's newest environmental program.

Superfund, formally the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, was signed in December 1980, after the disaster at Love Canal in Niagara Falls, New York. There, a working-class neighbourhood, mostly white, had been built over a buried chemical dump, and residents led by a young mother named Lois Gibbs organized after chemicals seeped into basements and a school site. Their fight is a reminder that toxic exposure has always crossed racial lines: the families of Love Canal were left with the same fear and the same runaround that Black families in the South described.

Superfund gave the EPA power to clean up abandoned toxic sites and to make the responsible companies pay. But cleanup required sites to be found, ranked and placed on a national priorities list, and the report raised the question of whether sites in communities of colour were being found and cleaned up as quickly as sites elsewhere. Later research and journalism on that question produced mixed and contested answers, but the question itself, not only where the hazards are but how fast government responds to them, became central to the movement.

How the report changed the argument

Before 1987, residents fighting a waste site in their neighbourhood were often told they were just one community with one complaint. After 1987, they could point to national data showing their community fit a pattern.

The report gave organizers a tool they used for years. It gave reporters a frame for stories that had been treated as purely local. And it gave members of Congress and federal officials a reason to act. In the following years came the 1990 conference at the University of Michigan that brought researchers together on race and environmental hazards, the 1991 First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, which the same church commission convened, and the EPA's creation of an Office of Environmental Equity in 1992. President Clinton's 1994 executive order on environmental justice followed.

Charles Lee went on to a long career in government. He later joined the EPA and worked on environmental justice there for many years, becoming one of the most respected figures in the field. The report's authors became, in effect, the founding researchers of an entire policy area.

The critics and the counter-studies

A finding that strong drew challenges, and some of them were fair.

The main methodological critique was about geography. A ZIP code is a large and arbitrary unit, drawn for mail delivery, and it can contain very different neighbourhoods. A facility on the edge of a ZIP code might sit right next to people in a neighbouring ZIP code who are not counted. In the 1990s, a team of researchers at the University of Massachusetts, using smaller census tracts instead of ZIP codes, reported a much weaker association between race and the location of hazardous waste facilities.

A second critique was about timing, often called the "which came first" question. Legal scholar Vicki Been and others asked whether facilities were sited in communities of colour, or whether, after a facility was built, property values fell and lower-income families, disproportionately families of colour because of housing discrimination, moved in. Those are different stories with different policy implications.

Both critiques were worth asking. Here's how they were answered.

In 2007, the United Church of Christ released a follow-up, Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty, written by Robert Bullard, Paul Mohai, Robin Saha and Beverly Wright. Instead of asking which ZIP code a facility sat in, they used distance-based methods, drawing circles around each facility and counting who lived within a set distance, regardless of administrative boundaries. With that better method, the disparities were larger than in the original report, not smaller. People of colour made up a majority of residents living near the nation's commercial hazardous waste facilities.

On the timing question, later studies, including work by Mohai and Saha that followed facility siting over time, found that in many cases the neighbourhoods were already disproportionately people of colour when the facilities arrived. Siting decisions themselves reflected race. But the deeper answer is the one many environmental justice scholars gave: if housing discrimination funnelled families of colour toward land next to waste sites, that is not a defence of the outcome. It is a second layer of the same injustice.

Why measurement is power

Consider how small the original team was. A church commission, a research director and a handful of collaborators produced a document that federal agencies with thousands of employees had never attempted. They did not have special access; the facility lists and census tables were public. What they had was a question nobody in power had wanted to ask.

The quiet lesson of the 1987 report is that counting things is political. A community that cannot measure its burden cannot prove it, and a government that does not measure a problem can claim it does not exist.

That lesson came back in recent years. In 2015 the EPA launched a public mapping tool, EJScreen, that let anyone see environmental and demographic indicators for neighbourhoods across the country. Under the Biden administration, the White House built another screening tool to identify disadvantaged communities for federal investment. In early 2025, after President Trump took office, both tools were taken offline, and the EPA moved to dismantle its environmental justice offices. Researchers and advocacy groups have worked to preserve and republish the data.

Whatever one thinks of how those tools were used, the 1987 report is a reminder of what it means to lose them. Before EJScreen existed, a church commission had to build the analysis by hand. If federal data stops being published, community groups and universities will have to do that work again.

The reader's own map

There is a temptation to treat this history as finished, a set of famous studies that settled the question. It is not finished. The pattern the report identified has proven durable, and the specific facilities have changed: fewer open dumps, more chemical plants, warehouses with heavy truck traffic, gas-fired power plants and, increasingly, data centres and their power supplies.

The people most affected are neighbours in every sense: Black families in Louisiana's industrial corridor, Latino families beside freeways in Southern California, Native communities near mines, white working-class towns in Appalachia beside coal ash ponds. A report that started with race also opened the door to a broader politics of who bears the costs of the economy. That is a politics with room for everyone who has been told their neighbourhood was the logical place to put something nobody else wanted.

What you can do

The report's method, look at where the hazards are and who lives near them, is one you can use yourself.

• Map your own surroundings. The polluters page lets you search EPA-regulated facilities by ZIP code, with their violations and penalties. Try your own ZIP code, then a few around it, and notice the differences.
• Join or fund the people collecting data. Environmental justice groups, many of them small and local, now do the measuring the government stopped doing. Find them through the organizations directory, searchable by state and cause.
• Follow racial justice and environmental fights together. The environmental justice topic page and the racial justice topic page collect current news where the two overlap.
• Ask your representatives whether they support public environmental data. Find their contact details and latest votes on the representatives lookup, and ask whether they will push federal agencies to keep publishing the information communities need.

A church commission with modest computers changed national policy by counting carefully. A neighbourhood group with a laptop can do the same for its own street.