Greensboro fighter against environmental injustice is optimistic after years of work (2024)

GREENSBORO, N.C. (WGHP) — It’s a charming part of east Greensboro.

One thing that strikes you when you drive through the Eastside Park, Willow Oaks and Cottage Grove communities is the people who live here care.

Most of the yards and homes are well-maintained. The people I met were all welcoming and friendly. And, by all indications, it felt as safe as any other neighborhood.

It’s hard to believe this is also the home of what many believe is among the most troubling and dangerous parts of the city’s history.

“It’s kind of insult to injury to find out that was done,” Courtney Ullah told me when I met her in the community recently. “There were generations of children who played here. They remember drinking from the fountains. Then remember playing baseball here, and then basketball here.”

She’s referring to a city park that, for many years, was a central gathering and recreation space for her older neighbors.

That is until everyone learned this park sits on what was once an unregulated landfill and its waste incinerator.

“It always with these pre-regulatory landfills as far as statistics show (are located in) marginalized communities. So lower income, predominantly Black and brown,” said Ullah.

Ullah not only lives in the area. She’s among the leaders of the Bingham Park Environmental Justice Project. For the last four years, it’s helped inform and unite the community to draw more attention to what it feels is an example of environmental injustice. Many call it environmental racism.

But finally, after all these years, the Bingham Park Environmental Justice Project is seeing a pathway that could very well lead to “justice.”

More on that in a few paragraphs. First, a little more history.

Perhaps not realizing the danger, the city opened Bingham Park in the early 1970s.

But it wasn’t until 2010 after the city started considering improving the park, that the state designated it an inactive hazardous waste/pre-regulatory landfill. 12 years later, in the spring of 2022, state testing found high levels of toxicity.

The North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality advised no one should drink water from or wade in the stream that runs through the park. It also pointed out that digging in or eating the soil could put a person at risk for exposure to arsenic, iron, manganese lead and other dangerous materials.

The city then put up signs advising people not to let their children play in the stream or disturb the soil. The signs didn’t work entirely.

“The biggest instance of soil disruption that I have personally witnessed has been the usage of like ATVs (all terrain vehicles) over there,” Ullah said.

The city finally put a fence up around all 12 acres in the spring of 2024.

And after all the Bingham Park Environmental Justice Project lobbying and after the city securing millions of state and federal dollars to pay for it, there is a plan to dig up and remove the toxic soil.

“There’s close to 20 feet of waste,” Ullah told me. “They want to remove it all.”

Most if not all the trees will have to go. But Ullah sees this as an opportunity for new trees to be planted as well as lights and plumbing for bathrooms.

“It’ll mean togetherness. I think that’s the hardest thing about not having a space like this is that it’s very hard for the community to really come together and commune,” she said.

The big challenge now is where to put the contaminated soil once it’s dug out, loaded onto trucks and taken out of Bingham Park.

The city has proposed putting it in the fully regulated and lined White Street Landfill on Greensboro’s northeast side. But it, too, is in a low-income neighborhood of color.

Many who live there are passionately against that happening.

Ullah says she can’t speak for others in the Bingham Park Environmental Justice Project on this issue. “But ultimately, it’s about the least negative impact on human and environmental health.”

In the meantime, despite the fact there’s no firm timeline yet for the soil removal, Ullah is proud of the work the Justice Project has done.

“Just a few people can make a very big change and can help change happen,” she said. “It’s important for us to come together as a community and to speak up and to learn to be always learning and to fight injustices. But most importantly, value each other.”

To read more about the City of Greensboro’s plans to remediate Bingham Park, click here.