An Environmental Article from All-Creatures.org

North Carolina’s Department of Environmental Quality Faces Second Complaint about Hog Waste in Poor Communities of Color

FROM Tina Vasquez, TheCounter.org
April 2022

Residents in Eastern North Carolina’s Duplin and Sampson Counties have to learn to live in close proximity to hog waste. Sometimes it’s just the stench of it, but depending on where they live, it could also mean that the waste is sprayed onto their homes, leading to health issues and attracting an array of pests–especially during the summer when flies are already in abundance.

Graphic by Alex Hinton | Source Images: iStock

The EPA is investigating whether it’s discriminatory for Eastern North Carolina’s hog waste operations to be centered in poor Black, Latino, and Indigenous communities.

Residents in Eastern North Carolina’s Duplin and Sampson Counties have to learn to live in close proximity to hog waste. Sometimes it’s just the stench of it, but depending on where they live, it could also mean that the waste is sprayed onto their homes, leading to health issues and attracting an array of pests–especially during the summer when flies are already in abundance.

These intolerable conditions are actually made possible by the state. For decades, North Carolina law has allowed industrial swine operations to dispose of hog waste using lagoon and sprayfield systems, which store hog feces and urine in open-air pits before spraying the waste onto fields. In Eastern North Carolina these crude operations are now changing. But not for the better.

In March of 2021, the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) issued permits to four Smithfield Foods-owned hog farms, allowing them to invest in biogas, a lucrative waste management system in which methane is trapped within sealed lagoons, in what is known as anaerobic digesters. The trapped methane gas is transported, processed, and sold by Smithfield as a form of renewable energy. A second open-air lagoon stores the waste from the digester, which is sprayed onto fields, then spackling nearby homes.

During Hurricane Florence in 2018, at least 110 lagoons in the state either released hog waste into the environment or were at “imminent risk” of doing so.

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Please read the ENTIRE ARTICLE HERE.

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