Air pollution is a large issue for many citizens around Atlanta and throughout all of Georgia that live below the poverty line. Toxic gases from coal-fired power plants are produced all over EPA region 4, which includes Georgia. African American communities suffer disproportionately from this issue due to their proximity to sources of pollution. In 2011, the EPA proposed a plan to cut down on toxic emissions from coal-powered plants across the state. It is estimated that African American communities in Georgia are 30% more likely to be affected by a coal plant’s toxins than any other community. It was estimated that this plan would save 17,000 lives and prevent over 100,000 cases of asthma. The expected value of these improvements was around $100 billion a year. To put this in perspective, this article states that for every dollar spent on this beneficial project, the average american citizen would see an increase of around $10 in health benefits. This movement has been extraordinarily helpful to Georgians and people living in the Atlanta area since Georgia is one of the top 5 states in number of coal-based power plants near low income communities. New limitations on power plant location have also been established. New factories must be built a certain distance away from any community to safeguard their health. This event can be seen as a great win for environmental justice. Because the EPA brought this problem to the center stage, new laws have been created to help protect the right of every person to equal health.

Urban dereliction is a major problem within the Atlanta community. It is the result of unequally distributed wealth and poor environmental standards which cause properties to become unwanted and abandoned. This in turn lowers the property value of the communities and members within the communities are forced to live with uncollected trash and other hazardous waste. These issues emanate from discrimination in policy making in regards to environmental standards. There is a clear difference in the amount of trees and other plants in areas that have more white people than areas with more people of color. That is, there are more trees in places with more white residences. With pollutants, the opposite is true where we see people of color are in the same areas where dumps and waste facilities are located. It is evident that one of the key issues is the amount of litter and illegal dumps found in these communities as 71% of surveyed people living in neighborhoods with high dereliction said that the trash was a problem for their community. The same survey was done with people living in areas with low levels of dereliction and only 20% reported trash as an issue for their community. From this, there is a connection between how waste is managed in comparison the demographics of the area, which shows the ongoing environmental injustice occurring in Atlanta.

In Atlanta, environmental injustices from the 1980s are still plaguing the community, and the rivers around it are living proof of that. In 2010, the river at Panola Shoals was deemed unfit for people to swim in due to the amount of pollution in the river. It was found to be full of sewage waste and trash which puts communities around it at risk of dangerous diseases. This river was used as an outlet for sewage and other hazardous wastes for facilities from the mid 1900s. This same river also flows through many majority black communities and posed even more of a risk then before reforms were put into place to reduce the pollution going into it. Nevertheless, the origins of this river’s drastically low health standards are the result of racial discrimination and a lack of efficacy in the political decision making which created these waste paths. When the EPA became involved in 1998, Atlanta was required to fix the overflows of sewage and trash created by the river costing over $4 billion dollars. In the decree, however, only $25 million dollars needed to be spent on communities with larger populations of minorities and it simply stated that there must be “particular emphasis... placed on input from minority communities adjacent to the designated streams and other streams affected by the discharges from the Defendant’s CSO control facilities.” This decree in practice did very little to rectify the issues of environmental injustice seen in the Atlanta rivers and the river’s current state is proof of that. It is clear that waste management and race are connected and minorities are typically used as scapegoats for the pollution placed in their communities.