The BlueGreen Alliance has long advocated for greater regulatory oversite of chemical facilities to keep workers and communities safe.

The Challenge

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has estimated that in the United States, roughly 131 million people live close enough to an industrial facility to be affected by a chemical accident, and that risk falls disproportionately on low-income and minority communities. Additionally, one in three schoolchildren currently attends a school in the vulnerability zone for an industrial chemical accident. There are also countless workers at industrial facilities who walk into potentially dangerous situations every day and first responders who put their lives on the line whenever an accident does occur.  

Frontline Communities  

Certain populations are disproportionately impacted by this threat. Of the roughly 131 million people living within three miles of facilities subject to the EPA’s Risk Management Program, approximately 20 million identify as Black or African American, 32 million identify as Hispanic or Latino, and 44 million earn less than or equal to twice the poverty level. In fact, the Center for Effective Government found that people of color make up almost half of the total population living within a one-mile fence line zone near these facilities, and that they are about twice as likely as white individuals to live in these zones. Another study found that chemical incidents are more likely to occur in counties housing larger Black populations. 

Additionally, low–income children of color are among the most vulnerable, being more than twice as likely to live in fence line zones as their counterparts above the poverty line. It is well recognized that infants and children are uniquely vulnerable to toxic chemical exposures, which can result in lifelong damage to the developing brain and other organ systems. 

In the Workplace  

Inside chemical facilities themselves, more needs to be done so employers who purchase chemical products and the workers who use those products are accurately being warned of the chemical exposures that kill between 50,000 to 120,000 U.S. workers every year. A 2023 BlueGreen Alliance and Clearya analysis of Safety Data Sheets (SDSs)—the main required method of chemical hazard warning in the United States—found that 30% of SDSs analyzed included inaccurate chemical hazard warnings. This means countless workers are left uniformed about the potentially deadly impacts of the chemicals they work with.  

In the United States, OSHA states that workers suffer more than 190,000 illnesses and 50,000 deaths annually related to chemical exposures. The AFL-CIO more than doubles that number to 120,000 U.S. deaths from occupational disease every year based on analyses in the peer-reviewed literature.