Race shaped the social and economic landscape of petrochemicals. Management consultants scoping site locations for chemical and oil firms, geologically and culturally mapping, rendered historic African American towns invisible; after chemical companies moved onto former plantations, they conveniently ignored African Americans living near and around them, allowing leakages, toxic emissions, and explosions to infiltrate their communities.
This concentrated business cluster then spawned a new phase of capital accumulation: waste removal. Southeastern Louisiana had become a toxic mess by the 1970s. This paper follows the emergence of companies that specialized in hazardous waste removal, in particular, Rollins-Purle (later Rollins Environmental Services), CECOS, and Chemical Services Inc. The waste removal problems engendered by Rollins-Purle and CECOS and careless disposal activities caused a new phase of toxic damage to surrounding communities, water, and lands in the 1980s. Following EPA investigations and a major court ruling against it, Rollins aggressively sought out reliable political allies in the state government to fend off further regulation and oversight. By the end of the 1980s, Louisiana produced a quarter of the nation’s toxic waste and had a larger share of hazardous waste incinerators, landfills, and injection wells. Waste disposal involved not only locally produced industrial waste, as this paper demonstrates, but these companies also sought to position Louisiana as a national receptacle of waste.