As far back as she can remember, Laetitia “Tish” Taylor has had close family members impacted by cancer or some kind of serious autoimmune disease. So when the Environmental Protection Agency came to her town, Reserve, Louisiana, in 2016 to tell the community they had the highest risk of cancer in the U.S., due to a neoprene plant that stood around 1,000 feet from the local elementary school, she says it felt like “madness.” It was also confirmation of what the community already knew.
This devastating announcement took place in the Fifth Ward Elementary School gym. “The children were at ground zero right there under the plant, unregulated, poisoning us for 50 years,” Tish says.
The plant is the Pontchartrain Works facility, which DuPont opened in 1969. It was the only plant in the nation to produce neoprene, also known as polychloroprene, used to make products such as wetsuits and golf gloves. In 2015, DuPont sold the plant to the Japanese company Denka Performance Elastomer. Regardless of ownership, over the past five decades, since the plant first started production, it has emitted a cancer-causing, colorless gas known as chloroprene, an essential building block used to produce neoprene.
Tell Congress: Protect Families From the Plastics and Petrochemical Industry
Within weeks of being told the risk of cancer in their community was 50 times the national average at the EPA meeting at the school, Tish’s father, Robert, now 85, decided to take action. He and his family formed the Concerned Citizens of St. John, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting local public health in St. John the Baptist Parish, the area surrounding where the plant is located, and pushing government and industry alike to be accountable for the condition of the air, water, and soil. The family had to do something.
“My mom had been diagnosed with breast cancer and later multiple sclerosis and thrombocytosis. My brother had kidney disease from three years old, and he was suffering really bad,” says Tish. Several family members were diagnosed with diabetes, “something that wasn’t in our family. My sister had been diagnosed with gastroparesis, a very rare and untreatable autoimmune disease. My grandmother had already passed away from bone cancer. My uncle had lung cancer. He passed away. My cousin had lung cancer and passed away.”
Tish says the next generation of children in the family has also been affected: many were born prematurely, and several were diagnosed with asthma, eczema, and upper respiratory infections. Others, she says, have been recently diagnosed with attention deficit disorder.
Pushing for lower toxic chemical emissions in St. John
Neoprene is a petrochemical product, meaning it is made from chemicals derived from fossil fuels. The neoprene plant pollution in Reserve harms people already grappling with petrochemical pollution. The town is named after the Reserve Plantation, formerly a sugar plantation. It’s what’s called a “fence-line” community because it sits directly along Louisiana’s Cancer Alley—an 85-mile corridor along the Mississippi River, from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, where over 200 petrochemical plants and refineries are clustered together, producing roughly a quarter of the nation’s petrochemicals and endangering the health of local communities.
A year after the meeting with EPA, in 2017, following an administrative order from the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (LDEQ), Denka agreed to voluntarily reduce emissions from the plant by 85%. However, even after cutting emissions, the chloroprene levels near the plant often remained five to more than 50 times higher than EPA’s recommended safety threshold. The agency’s position has been that it’s not simply about a percent reduction, but about meeting a health-based standard, which is 0.2 micrograms per cubic meter, a very small amount of pollution in the air.
“We started going to council meetings. We started going to the school board. We actually thought that the federal government was going to make them [Denka] lower their emissions to a safe level. And we understood it may have taken time, but we wanted the children to be moved because children are more susceptible to the effects of it,” Tish recalls.
The push to get Denka to lower its emissions failed repeatedly, says Tish, and the LDEQ was no help at all.
Shining a global spotlight on pollution in Louisiana
Robert Taylor traveled to Japan—twice!—in 2018 and then again in 2019 to try to persuade the owners of Denka to adhere to EPA-set pollution standards, but to no avail. Meanwhile, Dr. Chuck Carr Brown, the former head of LDEQ began attending school board meetings to push back against the Taylors, claiming Robert was a lying “fearmonger,” despite EPA’s 2016 assessment of the plant’s emissions that proved the existence of high levels of chloroprene around the facility.
By 2021, Concerned Citizens of St. John had covered significant ground in their advocacy efforts. The group and other residents from St. John and St. James Parishes were invited to Geneva, Switzerland, on a trip sponsored by the Center for Constitutional Rights to speak before a committee of the United Nations General Assembly. This came after the special rapporteurs and expert groups wrote a letter to the U.S. government raising concern about environmental racism in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley, specifically, the pollution from petrochemical plants disproportionately harming Black communities.
In 2022, EPA conducted an on-site inspection of Denka, which failed to show the required improvements in emissions. That December, the agency entered into a consent decree with the company, ordering the plant to address its waste management practices and further lower emissions.
“A sense of accomplishment”
Finally, in 2023, President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice and EPA sued Denka. It was “validation, you understand, that this is real and that the LDEQ and the health department were a part of putting us in imminent danger,” Tish says of the lawsuit.
The next year, EPA finalized stricter rules on chloroprene emissions, giving Denka 90 days to lower emissions.
But just when Concerned Citizens of St. John thought a sea-change might finally come, in March 2025, President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice dismissed EPA’s lawsuit, alleging it was fulfilling a “promise to dismantle radical DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) programs and restore integrity to federal enforcement efforts.”
Despite the suit’s dismissal, on May 13, 2025, Denka announced it would be closing. The company cited “significant cost,” owing to “among other factors: identification, design, purchase, installation, and operation of pollution control equipment to reduce chloroprene emissions that DPE did not anticipate being required at the time it acquired the facility from E.I. DuPont.”
In the end, Tish says her family’s organization is “desperate to have a sense of accomplishment.” There is always fear that the facility could reopen, but for now, “there’s no chloroprene in the air,” she says.
To those who think a small advocacy group out of a tiny parish in Louisiana can’t make monumental changes, Tish simply says, “You have to speak up. It doesn’t matter how big it is, whatever it is that’s important, especially when it comes to the health of your entire community, your families, for generations, for the future, you have to speak up. You have to.”
To hear more from Tish, listen to her podcast, The Good Neighbor.
Tell Congress: Protect Families From the Plastics and Petrochemical Industry