Our Work

Workers, lawmakers and environmental advocates gathered  this week to speak out against a proposed federal rule that would roll back protections for people who live near hazardous facilities across the country. “This is just the latest example of how this administration will do whatever it can to put industry profit over the health and safety of workers, first responders and communities that allow those companies to exist in the first place,” US Rep. Paul Tonko, a Democrat from New York, said during a March 25 press event on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. The event was organized by the Coalition to Prevent Chemical Disasters, an alliance of community, environmental, and labor organizations working to strengthen federal regulations to prevent chemical disasters.

In 2024, the federal Environmental Protection Agency attempted to address the risk of chemical leaks through a rule called the Safer Communities by Chemical Accident Prevention. It promised a modest course correction, requiring dangerous plants to investigate past accidents, plan for climate-fueled disasters, give workers more power to halt unsafe operations, and, in some cases, switch to safer chemicals or processes. But last month, Trump’s EPA proposed gutting most of those safeguards before they ever took effect, moving to strip away requirements for safer technologies, climate and natural disaster planning, third-party safety audits, and strong worker participation in decision making. “For fenceline communities and facility workers, this rollback is a declaration that our lives are deemed acceptable sacrifices,” said Ana Parras, executive director of Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services, a group that has worked in several national coalitions around chemical safety.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has proposed weaker regulations for the nation’s most hazardous chemical facilities, drawing opposition from community, environmental justice, labor and environmental health groups. “This rollback will cost lives,” said Michele Roberts, National Coordinator of the Environmental Justice Health Alliance for Chemical Policy Reform. “EJHA affiliates refuse to continue to sacrifice their families’ health and safety for the profits of corporate polluters.”

While paraquat is prohibited from use on farms in China, continued imports to the United States are protected from trade barriers. Paraquat was recently put on a 37-page list of products that were exempt from tariffs President Donald Trump put on China. “The health and environmental harms of paraquat will be felt in U.S. communities for generations, while profits from paraquat sales overwhelmingly flow to Chinese companies,” researchers wrote. Imports to the United States rose from just 11 million pounds in 2012, according to the report from advocacy organizations Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, Coming Clean and the Pesticide Action Network. The report was produced as part of a research series from the advocacy groups that’s examining the harm of pesticides. “Foreign-owned agrochemical companies are profiting while our essential farming communities suffer,” said Judy Robinson, executive director of Coming Clean, in a statement.

“EPA doesn’t need to wait for new science to ban paraquat in the United States. Credible research meeting EPA’s “gold standard” tenets has already been submitted to EPA’s public docket demonstrating that exposure to paraquat causes harm to farmworkers, farmers, and rural communities, and that its continued registration for use poses an unreasonable risk to these communities. Study after study has shown that people who use or are exposed to paraquat are more likely to develop Parkinson’s disease and other adverse health conditions. The evidence of harm is strong enough that over 70 countries have already banned this toxic pesticide from use. Meanwhile, EPA has declined to review this evidence. Now, by suggesting that we need to wait for “accurate new studies [to] reveal additional risk,” EPA is attempting to push the regulatory reset button to buy chemical corporations profiting from paraquat sales more time.

Paul Friday remembers when his hand started flopping in the cold weather – the first sign nerve cells in his brain were dying. He was eventually diagnosed with Parkinson’s, a brain disease that gets worse over time. His limbs got stiffer. He struggled to walk. He couldn’t keep living on his family farm. Shortly afterward, Friday came to believe that decades of spraying a pesticide called paraquat at his peach orchard in southwestern Michigan may be the culprit. The pesticide, a weed killer, is extremely toxic. With evidence of its harms stacking up, it’s already been banned in dozens of countries all over the world, including the United Kingdom and China, where it’s made. Yet last year, its manufacturer Syngenta, a subsidiary of a company owned by the Chinese government, continued selling paraquat in the United States and other nations that haven’t banned it.

The southeastern Louisiana city of St. Gabriel has zero major fast food chain restaurants, pharmacies or laundromats. But there are nearly a dozen chemical facilities within city limits and at least 30 within a 10 mile radius. St. Gabriel is home to the Syngenta agrochemical facility, which repackages a popular but highly toxic farming pesticide known as paraquat under the brand name Gramoxone before it is distributed to other states. The plant is owned by the Chinese company SinoChem Holdings Ltd.  A report released in October by Coming Clean, Alianza Nacional de Campesinas and Pesticide Action and Agroecology Network warned of the dangers of paraquat exposure. Banned in over 70 countries, it remains one of the most commonly used chemicals by farmers in the United States for weed management — with the largest point of entry in the last eight years being the Port of New Orleans, according to Jim Vallete, a contributing researcher to the report.