The Trump administration announced Wednesday it the EPA is shutting down all environmental justice offices and officially end other EJ-related initiatives, a move that will impact how waste and recycling industries measure and track their environmental impact on neighboring communities.

The closures include the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights, created during the Biden administration to work directly with communities on EJ-related issues. The announcement followed a decision from the U.S. EPA to cancel numerous grants meant to fund environmental justice projects.

The agency has quietly shut down other EJ-related tools in recent weeks, notably EJScreen, an open-source mapping and screening tool waste companies use to track environmental justice factors, such as health and socioeconomic data, near facilities.

The U.S. EPA under Trump has hinted at ending environmental justice initiatives for the last few weeks, calling such programs “forced discrimination,” making the EPA officially ending environmental justice programs not a surprise. The administration first announced its plans to end EJ-related programs in January, when Trump signed an executive order on the matter.

“Some believe that so-called ‘environmental justice’ is warranted to assist communities that have been left behind. This idea sounds good in theory and receives bipartisan support,” said EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin in a statement Wednesday, regarding the EPA ending environmental justice programs. “But in reality, ‘environmental justice’ has been used primarily as an excuse to fund left-wing activists instead of actually spending those dollars to directly remediate environmental issues for those communities.”

The Trump administration’s view on environmental justice is a major departure from the Biden administration, which intended EJ to be a permanent facet of the EPA’s work, acknowledging that many Americans face a disproportionate amount of pollution and health impacts due to the impacts of racism and climate change.

Environmental groups have criticized the EPA ending environmental justice programs, saying the move will leave communities with fewer resources to advocate for pollution cleanup and prevention efforts and hold some businesses less accountable for pollution.

Read the full article about the waste industry and environmental justice by Megan Quinn at Waste Dive.