Social Justice Activism

Introduced by Henry Waxman, the act required all corporations to report their toxic
chemical pollution annually, which was then gathered into a report known as the Toxics
Release Inventory (TRI).
Corporate Toxics Information Report
The Corporate Toxics Information Project (CTIP) was founded on the guidelines that
they will "[develop] and [disseminate] information and analysis on corporate releases of
pollutants and the consequences for communities". The overarching goal was to help
take corporations into account for their pollution habits, by collecting information and
putting it in databases so to make it available to the general public. The four goals of the
project were to develop 1) corporate rankings, 2) regional reports, based on state,
region, and metropolitan areas, 3) industry reports, based on industrial sectors, and 4)
to create a web-based resource open to the entire population, that can depict all the
collected data. The data collection would be done by the Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) and then analyzed and disseminated by the PERI institute.
One of the biggest projects of CTIP was the Toxic 100. The Toxic 100 is an index of the
top 100 air polluters around the United States in terms of the country's largest
corporations. The list is based on the EPA's Risk Screening Environmental Indicators
(RSEI), which "assesses the chronic human health risk from industrial toxic releases",
as well as the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI), which is where the corporations must
report their chemical releases to the US government. Since its original publishing date
in 2004, the Toxic 100 has been updated five times, with the latest update in 2016.
Around the world
In recent years environmental justice campaigns have also emerged in other parts of
the world, such as India, South Africa, Israel, Nigeria, Mexico, Hungary, Uganda, and
the United Kingdom. In Europe for example, there is evidence to suggest that the
Romani people and other minority groups of non-European descent are suffering from
environmental inequality and discrimination.
Europe
In Europe, the Romani peoples are ethnic minorities and differ from the rest of the
European people by their culture, language, and history. The environmental
discrimination that they experience ranges from the unequal distribution of
environmental harms as well as the unequal distribution of education, health services
and employment. In many countries Romani peoples are forced to live in the slums
because many of the laws to get residence permits are discriminatory against them.
This forces Romani people to live in urban "ghetto" type housing or in shantytowns. In
the Czech Republic and Romania, the Romani peoples are forced to live in places that
have less access to running water and sewage, and in Ostrava, Czech Republic, the
Romani people live in apartments located above an abandoned mine, which emits
methane. Also in Bulgaria, the public infrastructure extends throughout the town of Sofia
Page 106 of 161