Global Trade Comes Home: Community Impacts of Goods Movement

For many U.S. residents, 2007 was a year of heightened awareness of some of the problems of global trade. Extensive recalls of melamine-tainted pet food in the spring followed by even larger toy recalls in the summer and fall raised consumer concerns about how the United States can ensure the safety of products shipped in from overseas. The Salt Lake Tribune and the Wall Street Journal detailed injuries and illnesses threatening the health of Chinese workers making products for export to the United States. And on 15 December 2007, a New York Times feature detailed the practice of farming fish in toxic Chinese waters for export to the United States and other countries. While these news stories demonstrate some of the pitfalls of globalization, much less attention has focused on air pollution and other community-level impacts in the United States, as toys, electronics, food, and other imports travel through ports, then to trucks, trains, warehouses, and stores in a complex system called “goods movement.” Along the route, residents are exposed to diesel exhaust and other vehicle emissions, noise from truck-congested roads, bright lights from round-the-clock operations, and other potential health threats. Transportation experts refer to these impacts simply as “externalities” of transport, but to community residents they can directly harm the quality of daily life. As ports and goods movement activity expands throughout the United States, a major challenge is how to make its health and community impacts a more central part of policy discussions.