The Price of Pollution: Why Michigan’s environmental laws fail to hold corporations accountable
By Yara Reda
For decades, Michigan has been at the crossroads of an environmental crisis and industrial prosperity. From Flint’s poisoned water to the smog-choked neighborhoods of Southwest Detroit, it has seen both the economic benefits and the human costs of heavy industry. Yet when those costs fall on residents, through respiratory illness, contaminated water, or degraded ecosystems, the law has often struggled to assign blame. The problem is less a matter of insufficient regulation than of a failure in legal accountability.
Michigan, like the rest of the United States, depends on statutes such as the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. The main objective of these laws is to regulate pollution by establishing limits on emissions and granting agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE) with enforcement authority over those limits. Yet recent events in Michigan reveal that, as usual, such laws fall short when it comes to chronic, cumulative, or diffuse pollution. This kind of harm builds up slowly, spreads across jurisdictions, and is most severe for low-income and minority communities.
The Flint Water Crisis of 2014 is the best example of the gap between law and justice. When corrosive river water leached lead from aging pipes, the contamination was first treated as a regulatory issue rather than a civil rights or criminal matter. It wasn’t until years later that criminal charges and civil suits finally emerged, showing how environmental harm that starts as “noncompliance” can become a catastrophic public health failure. Flint exposed a central flaw in environmental enforcement: the law usually acts after damage has occurred, not before. Long-term exposure to lead and the years it took to begin remedies affirm how bureaucratic procedures can delay accountability.
In theory, environmental law offers powerful tools for corporate responsibility. The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), or Superfund, enables the federal government to require polluters to undertake cleanup of hazardous sites or pay for cleanup costs. However, the Supreme Court’s 1998 decision in United States v. Bestfoods revealed that power has its limits. The Court ruled that a parent company cannot be held liable for contamination by its subsidiary in every instance, but only where it participated directly in the operations that caused pollution. While this decision certainly preserved the doctrine of corporate separateness, it has simultaneously created a legal shield: risk can be compartmentalized in subsidiaries by large corporations that keep the profits and outsource liability.
This legal framework continues to define Michigan’s environmental landscape. Many of the state’s worst polluters, such as chemical plants, waste facilities, and refineries, operate under multi-layered corporate hierarchies that make accountability impossible to achieve. When pollution occurs, the responsible entity may be a limited-liability subsidiary with minimal assets. Residents may win a judgment, only to find that the company able to pay is legally untouchable. Bestfoods remains a cornerstone of corporate defense in pollution cases, often cited to prevent the piercing of the corporate veil.
A similar case, Sterling v. Velsicol Chemical Corp (1988), although not originating in Michigan, created an important precedent within the Sixth Circuit regarding toxic tort claims. In that case, residents near a chemical burial site had their groundwater contaminated, and the court found the corporation to be negligent without direct proof of intent. The case displayed how circumstantial evidence, for instance, contamination patterns, could establish liability. Yet thirty years later, Michigan communities with contamination ranging from per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) to petroleum byproducts continue to face steep hurdles in proving causation under narrow evidentiary standards. The burden frequently falls on affected residents to provide scientific proof of injury, even when contamination levels are publicly documented.
This dynamic plays out in real time in Southwest Detroit, home to the massive Marathon Petroleum refinery, which has long faced criticism for emitting sulfur dioxide and particulate matter. Neighboring communities, largely home to Black and Arab American residents, have reported asthma rates more than twice the state average. The Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE) has fined Marathon several times for exceeding its emissions limits, in findings documented by the Detroit Free Press. Yet, despite repeated violations, the refinery continues to operate.
Why does this occur? Because the law treats these fines as compliance, not failure. The Clean Air Act authorizes civil penalties for violations, but it does not mandate operational shutdowns or criminal prosecution unless intent or willful misconduct can be proved. Consequently, corporations can and do treat fines as a cost of doing business. This exposes a deeper weakness in environmental law: it regulates pollutants, not polluters. So long as companies pay their fines, they are legally “compliant,” even as the surrounding community bears the cumulative health burden.
The problem is not one of enforcement, but of how legal responsibility is structured. Environmental damages are generally collective, historical, and multicausal, making it nearly impossible for plaintiffs to meet the legal burden of proof. Courts demand that plaintiffs demonstrate a direct link between a specific defendant’s actions and a specific injury, a standard that fails in communities where multiple industrial sources contribute to contamination.
The decision of the Supreme Court in Atlantic Richfield Co. v. Christian (2020) helped illustrate this situation. Landowners near a Superfund site in Montana sought additional cleanup beyond what EPA standards required, yet the Court held that private citizens cannot force actions inconsistent with EPA-approved cleanups. While that decision strengthened the hand of the EPA in its authority, it essentially took away any hope for community concerns that desire more stringent remediation. The case also brought into sharp focus a paradox with which Michigan is all too familiar: communities polluted often have little or no avenue to insist on more than what regulators can or will provide.
This legal dependence on administrative enforcement rather than judicial remedy created what scholars call "bureaucratic justice”. In practice, residents of polluted communities must depend upon agencies to act on their behalf. If those agencies settle for minimal penalties or delay enforcement, as has happened with PFAS contamination in Oscoda Township, Michigan, and Parchment, Michigan, residents have little recourse. They are bound by agency discretion, not constitutional right.
At the root of this problem is a flawed assumption that compliance regulation is the same as justice. The reality is that compliance frameworks rarely address structural injustices. Michigan’s most polluted ZIP codes are disproportionately poor and minority communities. Too often, these residents also lack the resources, time, or legal standing to bring their own lawsuits under the Clean Air Act’s citizen-suit provision. Even when they do, companies invoke such doctrines as corporate personhood and limited liability to shield parent companies from exposure. Courts remain reluctant to pierce the corporate veil, fearing economic instability or excessive litigation.
This restraint privileges economic predictability over environmental justice. That means in Michigan, communities may be harmed, and the law recognizes no responsible party. Environmental injury becomes diffuse across entities, jurisdictions, and generations, with no clear avenue for redress. The formality of the law protects corporate structures while leaving people legally invisible.
Reform does not have to mean reinventing the law. It just means reinterpreting it. The courts could press doctrines of joint and several liability harder, making sure that all members of a corporate family are held liable for the harm it causes. Legislatures could revise state statutes to acknowledge cumulative pollution as a unique legal injury, making it easier for plaintiffs to rely on neighborhood-level data to make their case. Agencies like EGLE could interpret “substantial endangerment” to include automatic shutdowns of repeat violators. And Congress could expand the citizen-suit provision to allow for class actions on behalf of whole communities, rather than just individual plaintiffs.
None of these changes would be creating new rights, but rather strengthening those promised. They would align environmental accountability with broader principles of tort and equity: recognizing that harm, even complex harm, deserves a remedy. More importantly, they would fulfill the original intent of environmental law. To prevent suffering, not merely to manage it. The environmental crisis in Michigan is not just political or scientific in nature; it is thoroughly legal. The statutes are there, the agencies are there, and the data are there; what is still lacking is the willpower to connect corporate behavior and community damage. As long as environmental law does not change to make sure corporations are accountable, in fact, not in words only, the people of Michigan will continue to bear the cost of pollution they did not cause.
