Characterizing Disproportionality in Facility-Level Toxic Releases in U.S. Manufacturing, 1998-2012

• In Event: 1561 - Environmental Sociology

Abstract

There exists a pervasive presumption in environmental scholarship of a proportional relationship between economic activity and environmental pollution, grounded in environmental impact models of the 1970s and reproduced in a range of studies of drivers of environmental impacts. Yet, empirical examples abound that not all pollution scales with level of economic activity. Rather a key feature of society’s impact on the environment is its unevenness. The environmental sociologist William Freudenburg termed this pattern disproportionality. This paper examines if proportionality or disproportionality best characterizes the production of toxic pollution in US manufacturing between 1998 and 2012. We find that high levels of disproportionality characterize facility-level toxic releases both within and across industries, even when normalizing for facility size. Moreover, high disproportionality is a stable feature of the manufacturing sector overall and most manufacturing industries over the fifteen-year period.

Authors

• Mary B. Collins, SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry

• Simone Pulver, University of California, Santa Barbara

• Dustin Tanner Hill, SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry