When Emanie Dorival moved to Seaford, Delaware, she was welcomed by a horrible stench. The smell came from rows and rows of chicken houses that hold thousands of birds near mobile home parks, churches and single-family homes in the largely rural community.
“It’s like poop mixed with rotten eggs,” Haitian-born Dorival said. “It’s part of the environment. People get used to it. I cannot get used to it.”
Seaford is on the Delmarva Peninsula, a region that produces billions of kilograms of chicken meat for US dining tables each year.
However, all that meat production comes with a dirty legacy, represented not only by the ammonia-laden fumes spewed from chicken farms, but also the hundreds of thousands of tonnes of poultry manure, sludge, egg shells and other detritus generated annually.
A new industrial use for chicken waste is now being considered, but it could create new problems for the working-class rural region: A major proposed biogas plant would transform 226,796 tonnes of poultry waste each year into methane and other byproducts.
Environmental and civil rights groups are challenging the plan, saying it would increase air and water pollution, and pose significant health risks to nearby residents, many of whom are black Americans or immigrants from Haiti and Latin America who speak limited English.
Dorival, a family nurse practitioner who runs two clinics in the region that serve mostly immigrants who work at the chicken farms, wants to know why the proposed biogas system was planned near homes.
“The way I see it, every human being should have a right to clean air, water and food, without having to fight for that right,” she said.
The planned Bioenergy Innovation Center in Seaford would be developed on a 91-hectare site where Bioenergy Devco, the biogas plant’s would-be owner, runs a composting operation. The property is surrounded by wetlands, freshwater ponds and residential areas, including a mobile home park that can be reached on foot.
The question of what to do with all the waste that stems from the region’s poultry production is already weighing on the local community. Currently, manure is often applied to fields as fertilizer — but that presents environmental problems, as the manure contains nitrogen and phosphorus that can run off into waterways, including the Chesapeake Bay, and is lethal to fish and crabs.
The proposed biogas facility’s proximity to the region’s waterways — as well as black and immigrant communities — also troubles local environmentalists.
The Delaware chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People were among those who filed a complaint with the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) earlier this year alleging that the local government discriminated against residents of color by failing to translate educational materials, offer opportunities for public participation and accommodate residents who do not have Internet access. The complaint was spearheaded by the Socially Responsible Agriculture Project.
The Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control declined to comment. A spokesperson for Sussex County said that it does not comment on pending or active legal matters.
Asked about its plans in Seaford, Bioenergy Devco, which is not named in the EPA complaint, said it was “committed to continuing to educate our community about the facility,” referencing a public document it submitted during the permitting process.
It also encouraged residents to attend its events.
There are approximately 2,300 biogas systems operating in the US, said the American Biogas Council, a trade association for the industry.
While most of the systems process wastewater or operate at landfills, about 300 are on farms.
In North Carolina, residents lodged a civil rights complaint against one such project, saying that the plan to convert hog waste into biogas would pose pollution hazards to nearby black and Latino communities.
In California, groups have been fighting against biogas production at industrial dairy waste facilities near low-income, predominantly Latino communities in the San Joaquin Valley.
Biogas facilities pose potential environmental risks. Such systems can emit greenhouse gas emissions and threaten water sources. Biogas is also potentially explosive.
In Seaford, the new biogas system would result in chicken waste being trucked to the plant nearly 200 times a day by Bioenergy Devco’s estimate. The methane produced at these facilities would also then be transported as compressed gas to a regional natural gas pipeline, and excess wastewater would be hauled away to be treated and discharged into a nearby river.
Residents worry about this near-constant flow of heavy-duty vehicle traffic.
“They trying to put these in places where they think people don’t care,” said Leon Lofland, 71, a black truck driver who has for a decade lived in the Sussex Manor mobile home park, a sprawling lot of dozens of trailers about 800m from the proposed biogas system.
Lofland is opposed to the biogas facility.
“They don’t give us no respect,” he said.
His neighbor, Mexican immigrant Maria Celayos, 32, lives with her four children and husband in a three-room mobile home at the park. Outside her trailer, a pink toy car was parked against a tree and a pink scooter lay on the lawn.
Her husband was fixing a tire on the car he uses to transport workers to and from a nearby chicken farm, Celayos said speaking in a mix of Spanish and English.
She said that she was particularly concerned about the added truck traffic.
“I don’t want trucks on my street because of my kids,” Celayos said, recalling how a few years ago a child was hit and killed by a vehicle on the busy street that runs alongside the park.
She said that government officials were being disrespectful by not meeting with the community to explain the plan.
“We’re immigrants, but we have rights,” she said.
On a nearby street, Sharon Smith, 48, who is black and works at a container manufacturer, said she wonders if the new facility would lead to water contamination.
“I don’t think I want it, because I don’t want them to mess up my water,” she said, adding that she wants to know more about the plant.
An environmental assessment paid for by Bioenergy Devco found the facility would not cause any significant air or water pollution.
However, environmental groups say that the company’s permit application is incomplete, contradictory, incoherent and legally questionable.
They say that anaerobic digesters have been demonstrated to contribute nitrate contamination that can leach into groundwater; that refining the biogas into methane would generate emissions that would affect air quality and contribute to the climate crisis; and that the approximately 227,000 liters of wastewater generated each year would add pollution to an already distressed river.
Michael Kleeman, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Davis who has researched the air quality implications of biogas production and use, said after reviewing the plans that they seemed to “appropriately address all the concerns related to air and water pollution.”
“Clearly it will be an industrial facility, but I don’t see any immediate cause for concern that it will worsen air pollution or water pollution in the surrounding region,” he said in an e-mail.
“It can be done with minimal environmental impacts if it is designed and operated correctly, but a better planning process would have sited this facility further away from residential areas,” he said.
The surrounding community is within 8km of identified sources of contamination, including hazardous waste and brownfields, EPA data showed.
The Blades Groundwater Superfund Site runs along Seaford.
Information from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that the community is at a high risk of chronic health conditions and vulnerable to environmental risks.
Other Sussex Manor mobile home park residents said that no one from Bioenergy Devco or a government agency had visited to explain the plan to them, adding that they have only heard about it from activists in recent months, even though the plant was proposed in 2020.
Dorival said she sees a lot of people at her clinic with chronic illnesses, including asthma among children and adults.
She said people who work at the chicken farms are already breathing in noxious fumes on the job.
Any new pollution brought by the new biogas system would simply add to the environmental hazards the residents in Seaford are already exposed to, Dorival said.
“These people are already in a vulnerable state,” she said.
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
“I compare the Communist Party to my mother,” sings a student at a boarding school in a Tibetan region of China’s Qinghai province. “If faith has a color,” others at a different school sing, “it would surely be Chinese red.” In a major story for the New York Times this month, Chris Buckley wrote about the forced placement of hundreds of thousands of Tibetan children in boarding schools, where many suffer physical and psychological abuse. Separating these children from their families, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) aims to substitute itself for their parents and for their religion. Buckley’s reporting is
Last week, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), together holding more than half of the legislative seats, cut about NT$94 billion (US$2.85 billion) from the yearly budget. The cuts include 60 percent of the government’s advertising budget, 10 percent of administrative expenses, 3 percent of the military budget, and 60 percent of the international travel, overseas education and training allowances. In addition, the two parties have proposed freezing the budgets of many ministries and departments, including NT$1.8 billion from the Ministry of National Defense’s Indigenous Defense Submarine program — 90 percent of the program’s proposed
RSS