Not In My Backyard

Formosa Plastics’ plan for a $9 billion plant near New Orleans sparks an environmental battle

- Bruce Einhorn, Joe Carroll, Samson Ellis And Sarah Chen

The countryside of St. James Parish, an hour west of New Orleans, is a hodgepodge of bayous and sugarcane fields, smokestacks and riotous tangles of steel pipe. Taiwanese conglomerate Formosa Plastics Group has a $9.4 billion plan to add a new landmark: a giant complex to make petrochemicals used in products such as playground equipment, drainage pipes, and artificial turf.

The company calls it the Sunshine Project. But environmentalists consider its arrival as anything but sunny, saying it could emit more than 13.5 million tons of greenhouse gases annually, equal to about 10% of the increase in U.S. carbon dioxide emissions in 2018 compared to a year earlier. Formosa says emissions from the complex won’t be that high.

Over the past decade, Taiwan has tightened regulations, making major local expansion difficult for Formosa. Meanwhile, the company is spending more than $14 billion to enlarge its operations in the U.S. Gulf Coast region. “They’re not building this in Taiwan,” says Anne Rolfes, founding director of Louisiana Bucket Brigade, a New Orleans-based nonprofit focused on environmental issues related to petrochemical production and oil refineries. “They are looking at us as a colony.”