Metropolitan Manufacturing Decline and Environmental Inequalities in Industrial Air Pollution in the United States

Abstract

The changing manufacturing economy has received scant attention in research on environmental inequalities, even though manufacturing work in the United States has dropped precipitously since the mid-20th century. I integrate manufacturing decline in metropolitan areas into the study of environmental inequality by using data on industrial air pollution in 1990, 2000, and 2010. I test to see if an indicator of change in the number of manufacturing workers in a metropolitan area from 1970 to each of the three study years is associated with more or less industrially produced toxic emissions. Findings show, somewhat counterintuitively, that metropolitan areas that have had a larger drop in manufacturing work are linked to greater industrial air pollution and that these findings hold in all U.S. regions except the West. Implications focus on how the indelible imprint of manufacturing history may condition contemporary pollution levels. work (Bell 1973). Research on environmental inequality in the environmental justice tradition has long analyzed industrial pollution from manufacturing facilities (e.g., Bullard 1990;Mohai, Pellow, and Timmons 2009;Taylor 2014), but it has not supplied a measurable sense of how this changing industrial economy has influenced unequal industrial pollution levels in the United States. Instead, the link