St. James Parish, a district located between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, is home for Sharon Lavigne. While working as a special education teacher in the early 2000s, she would wake up at 6:30 a.m. before heading to work. But instead of breathing in fresh morning air, a putrid smell would hit her, making her want to go back inside her house. The fumes came from the local petrochemical plants, which often pumped out chemicals, late into the night.
“I didn’t know where it was coming from,” said Lavigne, who is 72. “I thought everywhere in the world was smelling, not knowing we were being polluted and [it] was our area.”
But Lavigne’s real wake-up call occurred in 2016, when she was diagnosed with autoimmune hepatitis, a disease created when the body’s immune system attacks the liver. She believes the disease came directly “from industrial pollutants” that she was exposed to, based on research she discovered online.
“If the industry wouldn’t exist, I wouldn’t have these problems,” she said.
There are 12 industrial plants within a 10-mile radius of St. James Parish, she says, and when Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards approved another plant — Formosa Plastics — in April 2018, Lavigne knew she couldn’t just sit back and watch. A deeply faithful Christian, she asked God what she should do — and she received a clear answer: become an environmental activist. So, she did.
“I prayed and I prayed…and I listened this time for God to answer me,” Lavigne said. “He told me to fight.”
Fighting the Good Fight
Before retiring in 2019 after teaching for 38 years, in October 2018 Lavigne launched RISE St. James, a grassroots environmental organization dedicated to preventing the expansion of local petrochemical plants. Lavigne says she quickly heard from others in the community, who also expressed concern over the harms that industrial practices could be causing for residents. The group has since grown to about 25 members, Lavigne says.
Lavigne has become a tenacious fighter for St. James Parish, which contains seven districts and about 20,000 residents. While half the population is white, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the fifth district of about 2,700 residents is 90% Black – and it’s where industrial plants “dump all their filth,” she says.
These negative health effects are evident. St. James Parish is located within “Cancer Alley,” a nickname for a region that stretches 85-miles along the Mississippi River lined with more than 150 petrochemical plants emitting cancer-causing chemicals, according to the University Network for Human Rights. Lavigne says many residents have dealt with serious diseases as a result of living near these plants, such as liver and breast cancers.
In 2021, Lavigne won the Goldman Environmental Prize for successfully stopping a $1.25 billion plastics manufacturing plant in St. James Parish, which would have generated one million pounds of toxic waste. Lavigne educated residents about the plant, which had been proposed by a Chinese chemical company called Wanhua. She met with local government officials and even led marches, prompting the plant to withdraw its land use application in 2019.
Lavigne has now won so many awards — including the Laetare Medal from the University of Notre Dame in 2022 — that she “can’t name them all,” she said. Lavigne was also named on Forbes’ 50 Over 50 Impact List in 2021.
Growing Up on the River
The Mississippi River holds special family memories for Lavigne, whose grandfather often fished in it. But industrial plants over the decades have polluted the water. A 1964 New York Times article reported that a “scourge of toxic and synthetic chemicals” killed millions of fish in the basin of the Mississippi River. Even today, “we can’t fish,” she said. The corridor along the Mississippi exceeds water quality standards for mercury, bacteria and PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyl), according to the National Park Service, making it also unsafe for drinking or swimming.
That’s why she’s intent on stopping Formosa Plastics from becoming yet another industrial facility built near her community. In 2022, St. James Parish residents filed a federal lawsuit against the Taiwan-based Formosa Plastics and also the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, the state agency that, Lavigne says, allowed “them to pollute us.” While a judge ruled to revoke air permits for the project in 2022, Formosa Plastics successfully appealed the decision. Now, Lavigne and St. James Parish residents are bringing the case to the Louisiana Supreme Court, she says.
According to RISE St. James, there have been several incidents at Formosa plants around the world — which produce polypropylene and polyethylene resins — that have killed people and damaged the ecosystem. One of them includes a 2004 fire and explosion accident at a Formosa facility in Springfield, Illinois. Five people working at the plant died, and local residents were forced to evacuate the area.
Many of the plastic-making factories in the U.S. use natural gas in the process, which create toxic chemicals that pollute the atmosphere and water, according to the Center for Biological Diversity. If Formosa Plastics is built in St. James Parish, Lavigne says residents will be exposed to even more cancer-causing chemicals, like ethylene oxide and formaldehyde.
The Story Exchange reached out to the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality for comment but did not immediately hear back. Janile Parks, a spokesperson for the Formosa project, said the health claims are “false and unjustified” and that the project will be “one of the most innovative, single-site ethylene production complexes in the world.”
For Lavigne and her community, Formosa’s arrival would be way more than they can bear. “When you put this amount with all the other amounts, it’s overburdened,” Lavigne said. “We won’t be able to breathe the air and we won’t be able to live.”
While Lavigne and her team fight Formosa Plastics, another battle has emerged. This time, with Koch Methanol St. James, a methanol-producing facility located in the region.
Koch Methanol is working on a $150 million expansion of their facility in the area. As a result, production of methanol would increase by 1,000 tons per day, according to WBRZ News 2. “We don’t want them to,” Lavigne says about the expansion. Now, she and other community activists are fighting the expansion in court.
Koch Methanol says on its website that it diligently follows “all local, state and federal requirements and minimizes air emissions by using a number of emissions controls.” It adds that it has conducted a “thorough” study on its water intake structure on the Mississippi and that it “does not adversely impact the fish population.”
But Lavigne doesn’t agree. One of the biggest solutions to environmental harm to communities like hers, she says, is simple: “Stop building all these industries that’s poisoning us.” She also said if companies want to build plants, it should be done in an area where there’s “no people and no life.” Residents should not have to move to escape the inflictions chemical plants impose, she added.
“St. James is home to me and there’s nowhere else in this world that I would want to be,” Lavigne said.
The Fight Isn’t Over
Following a hearing in April, a state district judge upheld the decision for Koch Methanol St. James to continue its expansion. While Lavigne is disappointed that her appeal was denied, she remains hopeful and plans to take the case to the Louisiana Supreme Court by the end of the year.
“People are [still] complaining about the air that they breathe,” Lavigne told The Story Exchange in September. “The community is not happy with this.”
Lavigne, who has 12 grandchildren, wants youth to get involved with environmental justice as well, so they can become educated and understand why some of their family members may be experiencing certain health issues. Her efforts have inspired her own 11-year-old grandson, who has talked about Lavigne and her work for his social studies project.
And while the journey is far from over, Lavigne is hopeful that she will be on the winning end in the battle to protect her community. “Once you put God in your fight, you don’t have to worry,” Lavigne said. “You’re going to be successful.” ◼️
