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 About CHEJ > Our Story > In Depth
25 Years of Grassroots Triumphs: A History of CHEJ
Twenty-five years ago this April, a housewife-turned-activist completed her long trek to Washington, DC, about to embark on an entirely different journey. Possessing only a moving van’s contents of her life in the now-infamous Love Canal neighborhood—along with the intense desire to empower communities nationwide facing similar toxic threats—Lois Gibbs founded the Center for Health, Environment, and Justice (formerly the Citizen’s Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste).
From the beginning, CHEJ was distinct from other environmental health organizations. Even the original four volunteer staffers, crammed into the tiny office in Lois’s basement, believed first and foremost in the power of grassroots organizing. Lois had witnessed firsthand how pure scientific data and legal regulations were insufficient to free her family from the toxic dangers at Love Canal. What had worked, however, was garnering local support, one petition signature at a time.
From the conviction that everyone has the right to a clean and healthy environment emerged CHEJ’s determination to help communities overburdened by pollution, most notably low income communities and communities of color. By offering the tools necessary to succeed, CHEJ rapidly became a vital resource for communities struggling to clean up local environmental hazards. The scientific and organizing assistance CHEJ provided to groups helped put into practice the belief that local political pressure has the power to generate widespread change.
While working to help grassroots groups rid their neighborhoods of toxic hazards, CHEJ’s staff recognized that using a mop on the floodwaters could only go so far—the influx of pollution had to be stopped at the source. As a result, the early stage of CHEJ’s history was largely preventive in strategy—an approach that has continued throughout much of the organization’s work. In addition to aiding local groups as they shut down existing polluters, CHEJ helped communities prevent new unsafe facilities from being constructed. CHEJ and its partners worked to make hazardous waste disposal so expensive that it would be more cost effective to simply avoid creating it or reclaim and reuse it.
The now famous Superfund legislation was created in 1980 with this idea in mind and is considered a direct outgrowth of Lois’s work at Love Canal; in fact, the media often refers to Lois as “The Mother of Superfund.” Superfund taxed polluting industries and channeled the revenue into a fund to be used for the cleanup of existing toxic sites. This legislation was key to CHEJ’s work because it aided remediation efforts financially while simultaneously creating a disincentive for polluting industries through joint liability. After the legislation passed, CHEJ helped spawn the Superfund Technical Assistance Grants. This program provided $50,000 grants for communities to hire technical experts to ensure citizens were able to fully participate in assessing site contamination.
CHEJ demonstrated its commitment to these local communities from the start by holding its first Leadership Development Conference in Ohio in 1983. Subsequently held at various locations across the country, including Louisiana, Indiana, California, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania, the conferences were aimed at strengthening the skills of grassroots leaders through training programs. At these events, collaboration among participating groups was encouraged, resulting in the formation of numerous larger-than-local groups and adding fuel to the national grassroots fire. Many of these groups, like Louisiana Environmental Action Network, continue to be vibrant, powerful voices making a difference at both the state and local levels today.
CHEJ’s Landfill Moratorium Campaign was another important step on the road to preventing pollution in neighborhoods nationwide. While dozens of new hazardous waste landfills have been proposed, only one has been built in the entire country since CHEJ first opened its doors. The law has not changed—it is still perfectly legal to build and use these landfills. Rather, CHEJ has empowered communities faced with the potential burden of a new toxic dumpsite to speak out. When CHEJ declared May 5, 1984 a National Day of Action, hundreds of groups nationwide held marches, rallies, and educational forums to help solidify the national movement to end hazardous waste landfill construction.
Another strong deterrent that CHEJ helped bring about during the early 1980s was Right-to-Know Laws. CHEJ aided grassroots groups as they collaborated with labor unions to demand locally based right-to-know laws, which were initially passed in 1985 in Ohio, North Carolina, New Jersey, Maryland, and Tennessee. For the first time, local industries were required to report their emissions of a wide variety of toxins. Companies’ names were associated with these reports, giving polluters an incentive to limit their emissions and disposal of toxics as much as possible. These laws also provided citizens access to this information, enabling them to find out what chemicals were being released, stored, and disposed of in their communities. This locally-tailored data was often crucial to groups’ efforts to build community support to clean up their environment. As these local successes accumulated, so did the pressure for federal action. When a national Right-to-Know law was finally passed in 1986, CHEJ partnered with local organizations to help state governments make emissions and disposal data available to everyone nationwide.
Throughout these first few years and still to this day, CHEJ has distributed its quarterly magazine Everyone’s Backyard to all members. The publication serves to document the challenges and triumphs of the grassroots movement for environmental health. By demystifying the science behind environmental health issues and highlighting the power of grassroots groups, issues of Everyone’s Backyard read as veritable how-to guidebooks for groups struggling to clean up their communities. Along these same lines, CHEJ has also made available to members and partners a plethora of publications related to various environmental health topics. From reports detailing a specific health threat and the alternatives available to handbooks on grassroots organizing, these publications have proved invaluable to groups across the country in their efforts.
Another program that began early on was CHEJ’s anniversary conventions, which took place five, ten, and sixteen years after CHEJ was founded. Held in Arlington, Virginia, these conventions celebrated the achievements of the grassroots movement while looking toward the future to develop strategies to realize the still-unaccomplished goals. Perhaps most importantly, they provided guidance to all those in attendance on how to achieve environmental justice.
Environmental justice was still a key theme in 1991, when the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit took place in Washington, DC. The goal of the summit was to solidify the key tenets of environmental justice and establish an agenda to ensure politics would better embody these goals. CHEJ was an important player in building the base of groups needed for a summit of this scale. The outcome of this meeting was President Clinton’s 1994 Executive Order, which instructed all federal agencies to avoid unfairly burdening low income and minority populations with pollution.
As CHEJ became increasingly well known for its unwavering commitment to local groups, a logical next step was to extend the reach of its site-specific support. CHEJ accomplished this by establishing several field offices scattered across the country—from Alabama and California to West Virginia and Florida—beginning in 1986. Manned by local staff, the field offices facilitated the formation of community groups in their area. Once these groups were established, the field office staff helped them gather the resources necessary to win their individual struggles. These local staff members also linked together distinct groups that shared geographic or issue-based commonalities, adding to the resources of both groups and heightening their chances of individual victory. For instance, if one group had just closed down an incinerator, they would be put in touch with groups facing a similar toxic battle. One outcome of this strategy was the creation of many larger-than-local and statewide groups. Through their ties to nearby communities, these new groups still enjoyed local political influence and were now even more powerful in statehouses, media forums, and corporate boardrooms due to the increased volume of their combined voices.
CHEJ further lent a hand to local groups through its Community Leadership Development Grant Program. Referred to among staff and recipients as the “mini-grants program,” this resource was unveiled in 1989. While CHEJ’s organizing staff provided communities with the knowledge and skills necessary to fight environmental injustices, CHEJ’s mini-grants supplied financial support for the leadership training critical to winning these individual battles. During the seven years this innovative program was in existence, 229 groups were awarded a total of $589,950. Strengthened by this influx of financial resources, recipients were better equipped to contribute to the national grassroots movement as well.
Perhaps it was precisely this wider web of dedicated and empowered partner groups that enabled CHEJ to accomplish so much during this early part of its history. One divisive issue that CHEJ first brought to light in 1986 was evidence that polluting industries intentionally discriminated against underserved communities. The Cerrell and Epply reports, among others, exposed industry’s attempts to site hazardous facilities specifically in low-income, racially diverse, rural, and elderly communities. The reports that CHEJ uncovered indicated that the decision makers for polluting facilities and some government agencies hoped to capitalize on these groups’ lack of political clout, thereby ensuring little resistance to their siting efforts. Although industry officials ardently denied allegations that this strategy was more than just an isolated incident, CHEJ and other groups had already opened the public’s eyes to the link between race, class, and pollution.
CHEJ’s Toxic-Merry-Go-Round Campaign in 1985 also captured the attention of many. For years, polluting companies had been relocating waste they had “cleaned up” and dumping it on a new community. Standing beside the local grassroots groups also tackling this issue, CHEJ helped develop strategies and regulations to end this detrimental practice. Today, polluters must remove hazards responsibly and cannot simply burden a new community with their waste.
In addition to preventing the endless circulation of waste, CHEJ worked to ensure that these dangerous wastes continued to be classified as such. The Kick-Ash Campaign did just that in 1988. Once again, CHEJ assisted grassroots groups in their efforts; this time, they were working to prevent the classification of solid incinerator ash as “special waste.” This category of waste may be disposed of without first testing for toxicity—a troublesome prospect in the case of incinerator ash, which is known to contain high levels of dioxins and heavy metals. The campaign resulted in the defeat of federal legislation that would have permitted incinerator ash to be categorized as “special waste.” This victory ensured that the toxicity of this waste would continue to be assessed prior to its disposal and that it could no longer be discarded in municipal landfills.
Perhaps CHEJ’s most visible campaign in these early years was the McToxics Campaign, which kicked off in 1987. For years, the vast majority of fast food restaurants had packaged their food in Styrofoam. Given the toxic chemicals released during Styrofoam’s production, use, and disposal, CHEJ considered this material to be unsafe and a threat to environmental health. These packages were also an unnecessary source of waste since, by their very nature, fast food sandwiches are typically consumed just moments after purchase. The McToxics Campaign united children, schools, religious communities, and everyday citizens, greatly expanding nationwide grassroots networks. In 1990, McDonalds finally announced that it would no longer use Styrofoam packaging; dozens of counties, churches, and government buildings followed suit by passing purchasing policies and local ordinances further reducing the use of Styrofoam.
With over a decade of success under its belt, CHEJ began to broaden its base of constituencies. The organization undertook extensive outreach efforts to involve new groups in the movement. Around the same time, it became apparent that the field offices had served their purpose of getting grassroots groups on their feet and establishing statewide support. The decision was made to close those offices and redirect resources to providing support to existing larger-than-local groups as they trained emerging grassroots partners.
The work of such groups became especially critical in 1994, when the EPA released a startling report on the effects of dioxin and its ubiquitousness throughout our environment. One of the most toxic chemicals ever studied, dioxin was found to accumulate in peoples’ bodies over time through continual ingestion of meat and dairy products. The EPA revealed that Americans’ levels of dioxin were so high that any additional exposure could trigger adverse health effects.
In response to these disturbing revelations, CHEJ launched the Stop Dioxin Campaign in 1995. CHEJ held several regional roundtables on the issue and played a key role on the organizing committee for the Third Citizens’ Conference on Dioxin. In the book Dying from Dioxin: A Citizen’s Guide to Reclaiming Our Health and Rebuilding Democracy, Lois Gibbs, together with CHEJ’s science staff and other grassroots groups, detailed the threat posed by dioxins and urged citizens to take action. In just a few short years, CHEJ attended 70 grassroots activities to help raise awareness about dioxin and generated over 220 media reports on the issue. These efforts educated the public about the variety of dioxin sources, including paper mills and incinerators, and sparked grassroots efforts to shut down such facilities. Of the 77 percent decrease in dioxin emissions that occurred between 1987 and 1995, a full 90 percent was due to grassroots groups shutting down dioxin-emitting facilities. CHEJ aided groups that shut down over 2,600 such facilities, making the organization’s Stop Dioxin Exposure Campaign one of its most victorious to date.
CHEJ also took the lead in eliminating products that result in the release of dioxin during their production, use, and/or disposal. As a result, the Health Care Without Harm Campaign was established in 1996, based on a group initially formed during roundtable discussions a year earlier. CHEJ and other grassroots leaders recognized that many health care products were made of PVC plastic and therefore contained high levels of chlorine. As a result, medical waste was generating and releasing a substantial amount of dioxin when incinerated. CHEJ and its partners believed that patients could be treated using alternative materials that would neither impact the quality of their care nor pose a health risk later on. This campaign was groundbreaking: for the first time ever, CHEJ helped spawn an entirely autonomous organization in 2001. Today, Health Care Without Harm is an international coalition of 423 organizations in 52 countries working to ensure that the health care industry is environmentally sustainable and truly embodies the oath “First do no harm.”
The most recent chapter of CHEJ’s history has focused on preventing harm to our health by promoting precautionary action. Instead of asking, “What level of hazardous exposure is acceptable?” CHEJ encourages the public to ask, “How can we prevent harm from environmental hazards?” This entails switching to safer products and technologies, thereby preventing pollution and the resulting health impacts before they happen. CHEJ has always been motivated to prevent such harm—rather than debating how much exposure could be tolerated—in the name of protecting those most susceptible.
The group with the least political clout of all is also arguably the most vulnerable: children. In response to countless contacts from parents concerned about their children’s exposure to a wide range of environmental health threats, CHEJ developed its Child Proofing Our Communities Campaign in 2000. The program has raised the public’s awareness of children’s unique vulnerability to toxins in their environment, the heightened risk of disease and lower IQ these contaminants pose, and the appalling lack of regulations to prevent such exposures in schools. As part of the Childproofing Campaign, CHEJ has released a variety of reports detailing the potential health hazards schools can pose to children and how communities can create safer learning environments for their students.
To help safeguard the health of our nation’s children through local action, the Green Flag Schools Program was created as an outgrowth of the Childproofing Campaign. This program unites teachers, students, and community members to address school environmental health issues such as indoor air quality, toxic cleaning product use, and integrated pest management. By encouraging those involved to investigate these issues and help change their school’s practices, Green Flags has empowered youth of all ages while helping to create healthier spaces in which children can play and learn. Launched just three years ago, this program has already made a difference in over 55 schools across the country, ensuring a healthier learning environment, one classroom at a time.
Another key program that shares the goal of preventing harm is CHEJ’s BE SAFE Campaign, which began in 2002 as a nationwide initiative to build support for the precautionary approach. The BE SAFE Network of over 250 groups held national days of action to promote precaution on toxic and nuclear issues on the 25th Anniversary of Three Mile Island, the 60th Anniversary of Hiroshima & Nagasaki, and the 25th Anniversary of Superfund. BE SAFE has helped groups in many states pass precautionary ordinances and laws, including Georgia, Illinois, Oregon, New Mexico, Minnesota, New York, and North Carolina, culminating in the launch of a national Precautionary Policy Clearinghouse. To help build the movement to prevent harm and unite grassroots groups working on a variety of environmental health issues, CHEJ's BE SAFE Campaign is organizing the First National Conference on Precaution, which will be held in June 2006.
An equally far-reaching program is CHEJ’s PVC Campaign, which has spread the word about the hazards of PVC, the “poison plastic,” as well as its available alternatives, with the ultimate goal of shifting the market away from PVC. Through the release of the report “PVC: The Poison Plastic, Health Hazards, and the Looming Waste Crisis” and a host of advocacy efforts, this campaign has enjoyed widespread success. Numerous major corporations—including Microsoft, Victoria’s Secret, Johnson & Johnson, and Crabtree & Evelyn—have agreed to phase out their use of PVC packaging. Since Microsoft completed its PVC phase out just a few months ago, over 361,000 pounds of the plastic have already been eliminated from the waste stream. Once again, CHEJ has demonstrated the power of grassroots organizing and advocacy to create lasting change.
This commitment to helping local communities help themselves has been the hallmark of CHEJ’s work throughout its history. Indeed, the organization has gained significant ground since those four devoted volunteers first crowded into Lois’ basement 25 years ago. Over the years, CHEJ has empowered more than 10,000 local communities to eliminate the environmental toxins threatening their health. With a network of over 8,000 groups by its side, CHEJ has energized local activists and solidified national coalitions. What began as one woman’s desire for a clean, healthy world has flourished into an organization playing a key role in making this vision a reality.
Despite its growth, CHEJ has remained unwaveringly committed to its original purpose: helping communities nationwide as they strive to provide a healthier environment for their families. The core beliefs inherent in CHEJ’s mission have also remained unaltered. Everyone—regardless of race, socioeconomic status, or age—has the right to live, work, pray, and play in a clean, safe environment. A healthy environment and a thriving economy are not mutually exclusive goals. A little waste prevention can make a world of difference. And no matter how small the community, widespread change can emanate from a few passionate voices.
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