Our Mission and Focus
Our mission is to protect public health and our natural resources by holding polluters and government agencies accountable under the law, advocating for tough but fair environmental standards, and empowering communities fighting for clean air and clean water.
EIP was founded in 2002 by Eric Schaeffer, the former director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Office of Civil Enforcement. Schaeffer resigned in protest when the Bush White House interfered with efforts to reduce harmful pollution from coal-fired power plants, and he dedicated EIP to the principle that politics should never get in the way of enforcing our environmental laws.
EIP is a national organization with strong ties to frontline communities and organizations in places like the Gulf States, Ohio River Valley, and the Mid-Atlantic region. We are dedicated to reducing the enormous amount of climate, air, and water pollution generated by the fossil fuel power sector and industries that extract, store, or process oil or natural gas to make fuel, chemicals and plastics, fertilizers, and other petrochemical products. These same industries surround low income and communities of color, exposing residents to unhealthy concentrations of carcinogens, smog forming chemicals, sulfur compounds, and other pollutants. EIP work also targets pollution from other sectors, including steel manufacturing, landfills and trash incinerators, and aluminum production.
EIP’s Center for Applied Environmental Science (CAES) ensures that local communities and environmental advocates have access to high-quality science and engineering expertise. By providing this access, which is a critical element in permitting and siting decisions, legal challenges, and rulemaking efforts, we support disproportionately impacted communities as they seek more power to influence environmental decisions that affect their health and quality of life.
Our Approach
Existing environmental laws fail to protect people and the environment when they are not enforced. Yet EPA and state agencies charged with protecting the environment are often squeezed by limited resources, political interference, and pressure from the industries they regulate. EIP helps to fill the gap that weak government action leaves behind.
Our in-house expertise in law, engineering, data analysis, public health, public policy, environmental science, and community organizing help us to see the full picture and develop and implement strategies that produce measurable results. Our expert staff uses a multidisciplinary approach to:
- Enforce the law against EPA or polluters to ensure our environmental laws work for everyone;
- Secure more protective environmental rules and permits;
- Analyze and publish data about the impact that specific sources of pollution have on local communities and climate change;
- Provide neighborhood activists with the legal, technical, and organizing resources necessary to effectively participate in decisions that impact their health, environment, and quality of life; and
- Educate and mobilize the public about the need to close loopholes in rules that protect public health and the environment. EIP has a hard-earned reputation for careful attention to both law and fact. Our work has been cited in Congressional hearings and debates, reports by the U.S. General Accountability Office, EPA regulatory proceedings, books, academic papers, and in frequent news articles.
Integrity is our middle name. We understand that details are everything, and EIP has a hard-earned reputation for careful attention to both law and fact. We always look for environmental improvements that make economic sense in the long run. Our backgrounds in law, engineering, public health, government, economics, and environmental science help us to see the full picture. In fact, our work has been cited in Congressional hearings and debates, in reports by the U.S. General Accountability Office, and in frequent news articles.”
Our Impact
For more than twenty years, EIP has helped reduce pollution and improve public safeguards across the United States and in hundreds of communities.
Federal Standards that Protect Air and Water Quality
EIP played a leading role in securing new federal rules that require the closure and cleanup of leaking coal ash dumps; cut toxic discharges from coal plants 90%; limit air and climate pollution from industrial flares; require gas processing plants to report their toxic emissions; and establish new fenceline standards to detect and eliminate toxic leaks from refineries.
Our advocacy encouraged the U.S. EPA to propose more protective air pollution standards for approximately 200 chemical and polymer plants that will include new fenceline emission limits for benzene and other toxins for more than two-thirds of those sources. In response to an EIP lawsuit, EPA will propose stronger water pollution standards later this year to reduce harmful nutrient discharges from slaughterhouses, the top industrial discharger of nitrogen in the U.S.
Enforcement Actions that Hold Polluters Accountable
EIP is not afraid to take on powerful industries who violate clean air and clean water laws, including refineries, chemical and gas processing plants, coal plants, paper mills, and large wastewater utilities. EIP’s enforcement actions against BP’s Whiting refinery for violating air pollution limits led to tighter pollution control and monitoring requirements and more than $3 million in civil penalties and community-based environmental projects. Faced with our citizen suit, the DCP Operating Company in west Texas agreed to reduce dangerous acid gas flaring at its processing plant near Odessa, pay $500,000 to fund local air quality and public health projects in the Odessa area, and pay automatic penalties for future emission exceedances.
Other EIP consent decrees required a power company to close and clean up leaking coal ash ponds in Pennsylvania and a paper company to monitor and clean up toxic pollution seeping into a western Maryland River. Both defendants paid a combined total of $1.65 million in penalties, and the power company was required to dedicate additional funds to protect local waterways. Our actions have led government agencies to cancel illegal permits or revise them to eliminate loopholes in multiple states.
Data Analysis and Reporting that Results in Action
EIP has a well-earned reputation for organizing, developing, and interpreting pollution and public health data that leads to successful enforcement outcomes, stronger permits, and tougher federal pollution standards. The EPA, for example, credited our exhaustive documentation of contamination from leaking coal ash dumps—which we made publicly available at Ashtracker.org and through widely distributed reports—for getting EPA the information it needed to establish the first national cleanup standards for these sites.
Our plant-by-plant analysis of nitrogen discharges from slaughterhouses will drive EPA regulation of the meat packing industry. EIP’s continuous monitoring of benzene concentrations in neighborhoods close to steel plants in Pennsylvania’s Mon Valley documented unhealthy concentrations of this carcinogen, and we’ll use the data to strengthen new emission standards that EPA is expected to propose for steel plants in 2023.
Our investigative reports are a resource for communities, activists, and decision makers and are frequently cited in the news media. For example, we marked the 50th anniversary of the Clean Water Act by releasing our state-by-state assessment of the health of our nation’s waterways, nearly half of which remain impaired, along with our solutions for what can be done to make them fishable and swimmable for future generations. The report generated 627 news stories across the country, including a prominent editorial in The New York Times and stories by NPR and the Associated Press. Later the same year, we released a national report on the widespread failure of the power industry to clean up leaking coal ash dumps, which featured in at least 554 news stories, including The Los Angeles Times, Utah Public Radio, The Indianapolis Star, and Inside Climate News.
In recent years, we have published reports on a wide variety of urgent public health and environmental issues, including the growth of the fertilizer industry and the pollution it brings, unchecked refinery water pollution, LNG export terminals, landfill methane emissions, greenhouse gases from power plants, toxic plastics industry pollution, federal and state agency environmental budgets, and more. These investigations combine illuminating data with human-centered narratives to make them both informative and accessible.
Community Access to Resources to Help Level the Playing Field
Our Center for Applied Environmental Science (CAES) is getting communities the expert assistance they need to fight shoddy, illegal permits for big new petrochemical projects and other sources of pollution. Recently completed projects include reviews of oil drilling permits in the Everglades and oil pipeline reroutes in Wisconsin; modeling of benzene emissions from oil refineries in Texas and New Mexico; reviews of air and water permits for offshore Gulf of Mexico oil and gas wells; an evaluation of the ecological impacts of dredging to facilitate crude oil exports from Texas; and measuring the toxins in dust and drinking water in a Pennsylvania prison.
Our Oil & Gas Watch website tracks the rapid expansion of oil, gas, and petrochemical infrastructure throughout the U.S. and provides grass roots activists with quick access to key permit documents for major new sources of pollution. Our Oil & Gas Watch News alerts grassroots activists when new permit applications are under review, but also include short bi-weekly investigative reports about big projects or industry trends that have an impact on both the global climate and local communities. We maintain interactive databases for coal ash groundwater pollution, benzene fenceline emissions, and state emission inventories, which 6 provide information to communities and support our ongoing efforts to clean up harmful and illegal releases from large industrial plants like coal plants, refineries, and chemical plants.
