By Maxine Gill, MCE Policy Coordinator
Background
Israel Chemicals Ltd., known also as ICL Specialty Products or simply ICL, has sited a new manufacturing facility in the North Riverfront neighborhood of St. Louis City– a neighborhood with some of the highest hospitalization rates from asthma in the city.
This facility is a part of the LFP battery supply chain, a type of electric vehicle (EV) battery that does not utilize rare earth minerals. LFP is a shorthand for the chemical symbols for Lithium, Iron, and Phosphorus, and is a powder substance that goes in one cathode of an LFP battery. ICL markets themselves as a sustainable company, and have posited that this facility will be an environmentally friendly “investment” in North City, but the full picture is far more murky.
This ICL expansion is sited at 401 Adelaide Avenue, about 1000 feet from residences and a middle school, less than a mile from the O’Fallon Park YMCA, and less than a mile from the Mississippi River. The site will emit nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds, particulate matter, and hazardous air pollutants. Even in small quantities, these pollutants will have detrimental localized health impacts.
Source: Google Maps (demarcation added)
ICL received $197 million in federal funds to develop this site, and an additional estimated $8.2 to $11.4 million worth of tax abatements from the City of St. Louis. One justification for these abatements is that this site sits upon a brownfield, or an area with existing contamination from prior industrial use that cannot be developed into housing or schools. Oftentimes, cities feel that they need to incentivize further industrial development on brownfields so that they are put to use, and may even create an opportunity for the new property owner to help remediate the site. However, this paradigm overlooks the residents who will live next to yet another polluting facility in a neighborhood already overburdened with environmental hazards.
A Project Compounding Environmental Racism
North Riverfront and the surrounding neighborhoods already experience some of the highest asthma hospitalization rates in the City of St. Louis due to a long legacy of environmental racism. Nationwide, polluting facilities are disproportionately and overwhelmingly placed within Black communities, leading to dramatic disparities in health outcomes along racial lines. The landmark 1987 study that coined the term “environmental racism,” called Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States, revealed that one’s race is the most accurate predictor of whether or not they live in close proximity to an environmental hazard. Studies in St. Louis replicate this pattern on the local level.
A 2019 report, Environmental Racism in St. Louis, showed that most of the City’s air pollution sources, like this proposed facility, are located in predominantly Black neighborhoods. Data on emergency room visits for asthma in the city show that Black children in St. Louis visit Emergency Rooms for asthma at roughly ten times the rate of white children.
St. Louis City as a whole ranked second in the country for gross death rates from asthma in 2024, according to the most recent report from the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America. The City was also recently designated as a “serious non-attainment zone for Ozone” by the Department of Natural Resources, meaning that the St. Louis area significantly exceeds allowable Ozone levels under the Clean Air Act. Ozone is a pollutant that aggravates the respiratory system, traps heat in the atmosphere, and harms ecosystems.
Source: City of St. Louis Strategic Land Use Plan (ICL demarcation added)
North Riverfront in particular receives air pollution from industrial facilities in East St. Louis, pollution from cars and diesel trucks driving on highway I-70, and residual contamination from a long history of industrial operations in the area. The census tract for this facility is 96% Black and above the 90th percentile nationally for both diesel particulate matter exposure and proximity to hazardous waste, among other environmental risk factors.
Source: Archived Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST)
A Law for Justice Gone Awry
ICL received a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) that was awarded in part due to an executive order from the Biden Administration called the Justice 40 Initiative, which required that “40 percent of the overall benefits of certain Federal climate, clean energy, affordable and sustainable housing, and other investments flow to disadvantaged communities that are marginalized by underinvestment and overburdened by pollution.”
This initiative appears to be a landmark policy that seeks to rectify historic racialized harms with new investment, but its implementation revealed a messy reality. The terms of the Justice 40 Initiative incentivized groups like ICL to place their facilities in historically underinvested communities, in theory so that jobs are created and infrastructure investments are made in the neighborhood. The company is able to market their industrial operations as “green” development and receive large federal grants. In practice, there is no requirement that facility employees live in the census tract or neighborhood where the plant is located, and the community is faced with yet another factory in a long history of polluting facilities they did not consent to live near.
A Flawed Environmental Assessment
In January of this year, MCE and our partners at the Washington University Interdisciplinary Environmental Law Clinic submitted comments on ICL’s required Environmental Assessment for this project, compiled by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The DOE’s assessment dismissed any localized environmental harm, claiming it would be offset by the adoption of EVs elsewhere. This argument attempts to justify a sacrifice zone– one community intentionally overburdened by pollution and facing disproportionate negative health outcomes in order to create benefits for others elsewhere. In this case, North Riverfront residents are faced with compounded industrial pollution and associated increased respiratory diseases in order to make EVs that are by and large unaffordable for the average American.
Troublingly, the DOE’s response letter revealed that this facility was initially sited as an expansion to ICL’s existing Carondelet facility, but was relocated in part due to “environmental impacts” to “adjacent residential areas” in Carondelet. Notably absent is any mention of those same environmental impacts on adjacent residential areas on the north side, where the updated plan features an even larger facility than the initial intended expansion–and thus larger associated negative health outcomes.
The need for transparency
Community advocates opposing this facility reported that though they attended the government meeting which granted tax abatements for this project, they were denied the opportunity to provide input as they had been promised. The $8.2 million tax abatement was approved by a non-elected City board called the Planned Industrial Expansion Authority, or PIEA, rather than going through the Board of Alderman, the elected decision making body accountable to their constituents. Opponents of the project waited during the PIEA meeting, expecting to be able to provide input on this abatement per the public comment agenda item, only to watch the PIEA pass the ordinance before soliciting any public input.
This large scale LFP manufacturing plant is the first of its kind in the U.S., and will be handling lithium, a highly combustible material. As such, St. Louis residents have questions about its safety. When a concerned St. Louisan obtained a copy of ICL’s construction permit from the Department of Natural Resources (DNR), however, it was redacted beyond any legibility. This lack of transparency does little to reassure residents that this facility will be safe.
Source: ICL’s redacted construction permit, obtained via Sunshine request
Last year, residents of Fredericktown, which sits 90 miles south of this facility, saw a lithium-ion battery recycling facility explode in their community, releasing a plume into the air and starting a chemical fire. Understandably, St. Louis residents want to know about the emergency management plans at this lithium-handling ICL facility ahead of its construction to avoid a similar combustion event. To date, neither ICL nor DNR has released any information about the facility’s emergency planning.
This facility sits about five miles below the Chain of Rocks Water Treatment Plant, which features two open settling basins that store the city’s water supply. In a worst-case scenario, concerned St. Louisans want to know that their water will be unharmed, but in avoiding community engagement and transparency, ICL has failed to build the trust necessary to assure the local community that ICL cares about their safety.
ICL has not garnered trust through their operations on the Southside, either. In order to receive permits from the air pollution control branch of DNR at its existing Carondelet facility, ICL had to demonstrate that their emissions would not violate federal limits. Despite this, DNR found ICL to be in violation of the Clean Air Act. DNR sent ICL four warning letters and issued an official citation in July 2024. This track record of overshooting emissions targets breeds skepticism that ICL’s estimated emissions will prove accurate.
Conclusions
Prior eras of industrial expansion have benefited corporations at the expense of communities of color and poor communities, who are left to bear the externalized health costs wrought by industrial pollution. We at MCE advocate for an energy transition towards sustainability and carbon neutrality without perpetuating patterns of disproportionate harm towards vulnerable and systemically oppressed communities. We expect to see the burgeoning EV battery supply chain in Missouri expand even more in the coming years, so it is critical to have mechanisms in place to ensure that industry stakeholders are held accountable for the harm they cause to communities across the state and the environment.
We must center racial and socioeconomic justice at the forefront of a green transition, which should include equity in job access and training programs, equity in access to green technology, equity in utility pricing, and consent-based siting practices for so-called “green” industrial projects. By contrast, ICL markets themselves as part of an “eco-friendly” industry without reckoning with their contributions to environmental racism in the Northside, nor the pollution they have already brought to South City.
We have lent our support to the community-led opposition campaign, ICL out of STL. We encourage our members and allies to add their name to the petition asking the St. Louis City Mayor and Board of Alderman to act to stop this facility. We also ask that members and allies send emails to their representatives using this template. If you have additional thoughts to share, we encourage you to call city representatives to state your opinion.
The I C L plant should not be built on the north side at the expense of the poor black residents who already suffer from asthma at a much higher rate than any other part of the city. The company has been in violation of the Clean Air Act and can’t be trusted to run a green facility. A water processing plant is close by as well.
This is not welcome in our community. Everyone deserves clean air and a livable neighborhood without the fear of chemical seepage, explosions- or worse, that the ICL hasn’t been transparent about.
Take your pollution elsewhere! When we know better, we must do better!