When Aminata Calhoun was asked to join Circular Philadelphia’s board, the invitation was certainly made with a consideration of the nascent organization’s diversity goals. As a Black woman of a certain age, she brought a racial and generational perspective that was very much missing from Circular Philadelphia’s leadership.
However, what excited Circular Philadelphia even more about Aminata joining the board was the incredible energy and network that she brought to our collective work to advance a circular economy in Philadelphia. For a taste of the work Aminata has done, check out Grid Magazine’s September 2020 Cover Story on her efforts just to green a small corner of her Belmont neighborhood in West Philly. Beyond that, Aminata has led a sustainable and zero waste lifestyle by example – whether it’s opting to finish the walls of her rowhouse basement with hempcrete or leading zero waste clean-ups in her role as the Centennial Parkside District’s Director of Sanitation and Environmental Programs. Suffice to say she’s a person who walks the walk.
After joining Circular Philadelphia’s board, she hit the ground running by promoting the circular economy to her community and attempting to encourage neighbors, friends and colleagues to become members. At our winter 2024 Board of Directors meeting – after a year of her limited success in attracting new members from her network – Aminata expressed the brutally honest sentiment that her difficulty was because it’s not clear from Circular Philadelphia’s website and other public-facing materials that the organization cares about environmental justice, a topic of high importance in Philadelphia and beyond.
This statement gave the Board the opportunity for introspection that yielded two actions.
The first is to publicly state that Circular Philadelphia believes that, on a very fundamental level, creating a circular economy is environmental justice. Whether it’s reducing resource extraction in vulnerable communities across the globe or creating a future where the US no longer relies on landfills and incinerators in environmental justice communities, the circular economy, when implemented equitably with care and consideration for all peoples is a system that creates a fairer and healthier future for all people.
It’s a system built on sharing resources so that more people can benefit from the wealth generation and quality of life that these businesses bring, both by owning or working at these businesses and/or being served by them. It’s an economy that doesn’t try to avoid environmental regulation or social justice in the name of profit, but by the design of the system includes those principles in its business model. Through fulfilling our mission to build a thriving circular economy in the greater Philadelphia area, we work everyday towards environmental justice for all of the region’s residents.
This connection between our work and environmental justice seemed self-evident to the founders of Circular Philadelphia and many of our board members, but after hearing Aminata’s feedback, we decided that we needed to do more. Aside from more explicitly connecting our work to environmental justice on our website and other materials, the second action that came from this board meeting is to work with our membership to develop a policy and guidelines for how we can work together so that everyone involved in the organization can employ environmental justice, both in creed and deed.
The good news is that we are not starting from scratch. Although we have not often explicitly referenced environmental justice, much of our policy work reflects an environmental justice ethos. Illegal dumping and littering are two top environmental justice concerns in Philly. According to the City’s Litter Index, a majority of dumping and accumulated litter is in Black and Brown neighborhoods. And in fact, when overlaying maps of gun violence, poverty and historic redlining on the Litter Index, these data points almost exactly line up with highly littered and illegally dumped areas.
The development of Circular Philadelphia’s Construction and Demolition Recycling Legislation policy guide and Expanding Access to Construction Debris Recycling policy guide were led by the goal to reduce illegal dumping in environmental justice communities. Additionally, our Single Use Plastic Legislation policy guide was guided by the ethos that the only way to reduce single-use plastic litter – like take-out food containers, the third most littered object in the city according to the Litter Index – is to reduce its generation at the source. Just as the plastic bag ban was supported overwhelmingly by Black and Brown communities that were sick of picking up litter, we are taking the same approach of garnering support with this policy.
Economic opportunity for environmental justice communities also drives our policy work. According to City data, a majority of the city’s 42,000 vacant lots are in Black and Brown communities. Through Melvin Powell’s leadership, Circular Philadelphia created a vacant land working group that Powell chairs and developed a policy guide for Temporary Vacant Land Use Activation that increases access to vacant land for local entrepreneurs and community groups to improve neighborhood safety and vibrancy and decrease illegal dumping. This work was informed heavily by reaching out to Black and Brown communities, many of which are environmental justice communities.
We don’t know exactly what a more formal environmental justice policy will look like just yet. But we’re excited for this collaborative effort among our membership, board and staff to align our values with our policies and co-create these guidelines. We’re committed to advancing this work because it’s woven into what we’ve been doing from the very beginning. We want it to be easy for everyone in the Circular Philadelphia community, be they members, volunteers, staff, board members or casual observers to make the case that circularity is environmental justice. We’re excited for this next journey and to invite our community on that journey with us.
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