Conservation and community groups sued the Trump administration today, challenging environmental permits for Formosa Plastics’ planned $9.4 billion complex in St. James Parish.
The lawsuit filed in federal court in Washington accuses the Army Corps of Engineers of failing to disclose environmental damage and public health risks, and of failing to adequately consider environmental damage from the Formosa Plastics plant.
“The Corps is unable to comment on pending litigation,” says Ricky Boyett, a spokesman in the agency’s New Orleans office.
“The Army Corps is fast-tracking the permits for Formosa Plastics, a company found guilty in 2019 of dumping billions of plastic pellets into Texas’ waterways and the Gulf. This is absolutely unacceptable,” Cyn Sarthou, executive director of New Orleans-based environmental group Healthy Gulf, one of the plaintiffs, says in a news release. She says the state should at least “require a thorough analysis of this company’s potential impact on our water, our air, our drainage, and our communities.”
The Texas judge called the plant there a “serial offender,” the lawsuit says. “Federal documents show that another Formosa Plastics Group facility in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, has been in violation of the Clean Air Act every quarter since 2009,” it goes on to say.
In addition to Healthy Gulf, plaintiffs are the Center for Biological Diversity, a Tucson, Arizona-based environmental group; the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, another New Orleans-based environmental group; and Rise St. James, a community group based in St. James Parish, where the 14-plant complex would be located.
Rather than preparing a full environmental impact statement, the lawsuit says, the corps put together “a deeply flawed and inadequate” assessment which failed to meet requirements to take a “hard look” at the plant’s direct, indirect, and cumulative impacts.
The lawsuit also accuses the corps of failing to pay enough attention to history. Its permit approval came before information about likely slave cemeteries on the property was revealed, and one of those likely cemeteries is on wetlands that the plant would permanently damage, according to the lawsuit. Read the full story.Â
