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There area number of conceptual, theoretical, and methodological issues in the literature on environmental justice and environmental inequalities in need of refinement. Using data from the recycling industry the author proposes an environmental inequality formation (EIF) perspective to address these issues. The ElF perspective synthesizes three major points that are largely neglected in research on environmental inequalities: (a) the importance of process and history, (b) the role of multiple stakeholder relationships, and (c) a life-cycle approach to the study of hazards. The EIF model captures sociological dynamics in ways that suggest that environmental racism and inequalities originate and emerge in a much more complex process than previously considered. Theory building in this area of research will aid scholars in understanding the mechanisms that produce environmental inequalities as well as their socioenvironmental consequences.
The purpose of this article is to address a number of conceptual, theoretical, and methodological issues in existing research on environmental justice or environmental inequalities. I will present several problematic trends in this literature and propose a remedy in the form of a model I term an environmental inequality formation (EEF) perspective. I will illustrate the model's utility with data from my research on the recycling industry.
THE NEED FOR BASIC DEFINITIONS
Most scholars who use the terms environmental justice or environmental racism do so with little attention to how to define these concepts, and they often use them interchangeably. Even fewer scholars use or properly define terms like environmental injustice and environmental inequality. My first task in this article is to operationalize or define these terms so that we may have a shared understanding of the basic sociological concepts we use so casually in these discourses. A rare effort to define these terms occurs in Bunyan Bryant's (1995) book Environmental Justice. He defines environmental racism as follows:
It is an extension of racism. It refers to those institutional rules, regulations, and policies of government or corporate decisions that deliberately target certain communities for least desirable land uses, resulting in the disproportionate exposure of toxic and hazardous waste on communities based upon prescribed biological characteristics. Environmental racism is the unequal protection against toxic and hazardous waste exposure and the systematic exclusion of people of color from decisions affecting their communities. (p....