Goldman prize:
Lead-waste crusader in East L.A. joins 5 others earning global honor
Leadwaste crusader from East Los Angeles is among six environmental honorees.
“This is not just something that happens in our community, but in all communities of color like Bayview-Hunters Point and Richmond. Toxic facilities are disproportionately located in communities of color.” Mark Lopez, 2017 Goldman Environmental Prize winner
aide to Gov. Jerry Brown did not get the answer he expected last year when he offered a gubernatorial visit to the East Los Angeles neighborhood where Mark Lopez had waged a long battle against lead contamination.
Lopez, 32, had witnessed too many empty gestures during the years he spent fighting pollution from a battery recycling plant to be party to a photo op for the governor.
“I told him, ‘Tell the governor to come with money, or don’t come at all,’ ” Lopez said of the phone call before Brown’s visit to the largely Latino neighborhood. “We weren’t there to take pictures with him. That’s not what this fight is all about.”
His blunt honesty helped persuade Brown to approve $176 million to clean up lead pollution at 2,500 homes in East Los Angeles and expand testing to include 10,000 properties near the pollutant-spewing battery smelter run for nearly two decades by the Exide Corp.
Lopez is one of six people who will be honored Monday with the Goldman Environmental Prize, given to leaders around the world who protect people and ecosystems against commercial exploitation. The award, he said, will inspire him to keep standing up to industries that exploit disadvantaged and immigrant communities.
“This is not just something that happens in our community, but in all communities of color like Bayview-Hunters Point and Richmond,” Lopez said. “Toxic facilities are disproportionately located in communities of color.”
The battle Lopez has been fighting actually began with his grandparents, Juana Beatriz Gutierrez and Ricardo Gutierrez, who were involved in the environmental justice movement when he was a child. They were activists almost from the day they immigrated to the United States from Mexico, starting successful campaigns against proposals to build a prison, a toxic-waste incinerator and an oil pipeline underneath a middle school in East L.A.
“One of my first memories was being pushed in a stroller during a march against the prison,” Lopez said. “When I was 10, I was knocking on doors speaking about various issues. I’ve probably knocked on every door in the east side in my life. I was born into that. I was raised in that. That is part of the legacy that I come from.”
His grandparents told him about the battery recycling plant in 2008 after he graduated from UC Santa Cruz. The smelting plant had been operating since 1922, but it dramatically increased production after Exide acquired the property in 2000.
“That’s when I first took it upon myself to learn more about the issue and work with other community members,” he said.
Lopez learned through his research that the plant was processing huge quantities of lead in the smelter — the equivalent of 40 truckloads of acid car batteries every day. The increase in production came without the needed equipment upgrades and the company refused to do anything about the noxious fumes it was spewing into the air, Lopez said.
He began working with East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice, a nonprofit group dedicated to the imThe provement of the mixed-race communities in East L.A., and went door-to-door telling residents about the fumes they were breathing and the lead and arsenic being dumped on their neighborhoods.
Lopez led bicycle tours of the plant, making such a stink that a federal grand jury began an investigation. Finally, in March 2015, Exide agreed to shut the plant down. It was a major victory, but for Lopez the battle was just beginning. Subsequent testing revealed that lead from the factory had contaminated the soil within at least a 1.7-mile radius around the plant.
Lopez, now executive director of East Yard, said the $176 million grant Brown approved last year was helpful, but he now believes soils testing should be expanded. He has lobbied California legislators and state and federal regulators to nearly triple the size of the area being tested for contamination.
“At first, they didn’t even want to test any homes to see if there was lead,” he said. “We are constantly having to push on this issue.”
Largely as a result of his work, the Lead Acid Battery Recycling Act was passed in 2016, allocating up to $32 million annually to clean up closed smelter sites like the Exide factory.
“I think it’s really important to note that there is no safe level of lead for humans, especially children, so it is important to expand testing,” he said. “Lead affects brain function, impulse control and can lead to violence and crime, all problems in our community. We need resources to address these issues.”