The Trump administration has withdrawn at least $1.6 billion in EPA community change grants from communities across the United States. Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The Village of Sauget in St. Clair County, Illinois, was founded in order to be polluted. Incorporated in 1926 by a group of Monsanto Chemical Company executives (and initially named “Monsanto”) it was and is an industry town: with deliberately lax manufacturing and emissions laws, it has played host to companies like ExxonMobil, Clayton Chemical, Gavilon Fertilizer, Eastman Chemical, and Veolia North America. 

The 134 residents of Sauget—and the 700,000 people in the greater East St. Louis metro area that surrounds it—have often seen their needs come second to those of their corporate neighbors. In the 1990s, according to the last longitudinal EPA study done in the area, they inhaled high levels of lead, volatile organic compounds, and sulfur dioxide compounds that can increase the risk of cancer and respiratory illness.

“We were basically incorporated to be a sewer,” the town’s mayor, Rich Sauget, told the Wall Street Journal in 2006. 

Trump aimed to “eliminate funding for the globalist climate agenda while unleashing American energy production,” the White House noted.

Since 1999, one well-known local polluter has been Veolia Environmental Services, a subsidiary of a French company that runs an incinerator, which stores and burns hazardous waste. The company is certified to burn toxic substances like PFAS, and people in the area have long complained of acrid or sewage-like smells near the facility. 

Darnell Tingle, who leads United Congregations of Metro-East (UCM)—a group of faith communities working to address environmental and social justice issues in the area—says congregants at the half-a-dozen Illinois churches within 10 miles of Veolia often wonder if the incinerator is what’s making them sick. 

According to Lucas King, Veolia’s........

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