Nov 12, 2021 2 min read

It’s not by accident that heavily polluting enterprises tend to be located near poor communities that don’t have the resources to fight against them. And Pennsylvania has a long pattern of allowing those enterprises to locate or expand atop previously polluted sites, such as strip mines.

So Gov. Tom Wolf is correct in trying to mitigate the effects of that unfairly distributed pollution burden, with a recent executive order establishing a permanent Office of Environmental Justice.

“My administration is committed to working … to strengthen our efforts to ensure environmental justice for all Pennsylvanians,” Wolf said while signing the order.

“Many Pennsylvania communities have been disproportionately harmed by pollution, and today’s executive order … is a first step in making sure that we have some of the tools to mitigate and prevent it from happening in the future,” said Department of Environmental Protection Secretary Patrick McDonnell.

According to the DEP, “environmental justice embodies the principles that communities and populations should not be disproportionally exposed to adverse environmental impacts.”

The new office clearly will focus on mitigating the existing effects of concentrated industrial pollution within low-income communities, and preventing those concentrations in the future.

But DEP never has needed a dedicated office of environmental justice to achieve those goals. While announcing the grand principles behind the office, for example, McDonnell’s agency has signed off on the 40-year expansion of the sprawling, stinking Keystone Sanitary Landfill in Dunmore and Throop – a project that directly contradicts those stated principles and goals and imposes substantial pollution harms on a wide swath of Lackawanna County.

Allowing the landfill to accept another 100 million tons or so of mostly out-of-state garbage clearly constitutes a community being “disproportionately harmed by pollution,” the very circumstance that McDonnell condemned in his statement about the new office.

If the Wolf administration truly is serious about environmental justice, it will review and reverse its unwarranted permit approval for the Keystone Landfill expansion, a project that perfectly describes what the new Environmental Justice Office has been created to prevent.