OUR History
Texas Campaign for the Environment was founded in 1991 with canvass offices in Dallas and Houston. Some of TCE’s initial victories included helping establish curbside recycling in Dallas and a household hazardous waste program in Houston.In 1997, TCE started Public Research Works, later renamed Texas Campaign for the Environment Fund, and opened a canvass office in Austin with a focus on air pollution. We worked with allies to close the Grandfather Loophole in the Texas Clean Air Act, drastically reducing emissions from older polluting facilities. We also assisted in the fight against lignite (coal) strip mining in Bastrop and Lee Counties to fuel a power plant that ran Alcoa's aluminum smelter in Rockdale.
In the early 2000s, we continued to work on waste and recycling issues, including helping communities in Northeast Travis County fighting air and water pollution from three neighboring landfills. We also succeeded in pressuring electronics companies such as Dell, Apple, Samsung and others to create takeback recycling programs. These programs shift the burden of recycling products and packaging from local governments and provide a bottom-line incentive to design for recycling. We played a leading role in the adoption of takeback laws in Texas for computers and televisions.
Over the course of the Covid pandemic, we shifted our organizing focus to the fossil fuel industry’s role in polluting Gulf South communities, destroying natural resources, and contributing to climate change. For example, we joined with partners and allies to contest dangerous flaring permit applications sought by ConocoPhillips at the Railroad Commission of Texas. We also joined Insure Our Future and Stop the Money Pipeline to oppose the financing and insuring of dangerous fossil fuel projects.
Throughout our history, we have advocated for a Zero Waste economy, including policies and systems for managing consumer waste and industrial pollution, especially at municipal level. Our efforts helped lead to ordinances requiring recycling for multi-family buildings in Dallas and Austin, and recycling for all residents served by the city in Houston. We also led efforts to pass local single-use bag bans and oppose preemption bills at the Texas Legislature. While we coordinated efforts to defend ban ordinances in the state courts, they were invalidated by the Texas Supreme Court in 2018.
We have also consistently watchdogged the waste industry and assisted Texans facing problem waste facilities. We helped organize in the South Texas town of Rio Hondo to stop a liquid waste company from polluting the largest freshwater waterway going into the Lower Laguna Madre. We worked with neighbors living near trash facilities to limit landfill expansions. And we led the effort to defeat Houston’s “One Bin for All” proposal to mix trash and recyclables, making it harder to sort and likely leading to incineration.
In 2014, we helped pass an ordinance in Dallas that effectively stopped fracking (also known as hydraulic fracturing) from coming to Dallas, and also assisted Denton residents in the successful effort to ban fracking by citizen vote. While the Texas Legislature subsequently passed a sweeping law to invalidate local ordinances to restrict the operations of oil and gas, the law’s constitutionality has yet to be tested.
After Hurricane Harvey, we assisted in the efforts to clean up the San Jacinto Waste Pits east of Houston after many toxic waste sites were flooded. We also worked to defend federal funding of the Superfund toxic waste clean-up program when its funding was under attack in 2017.
In 2018, we began a concentrated effort to support community organizing in the Coastal Bend, with an initial focus on opposing the air pollution permit of a massive ExxonMobil-Sabic plastics pellet plant. While that permit was granted, we helped form a community coalition to oppose the petrochemical and fossil fuel export buildout more broadly. Since then we have been working closely with community partners to fight new and expanding crude oil and fracked gas export facilities, and stop proposed baywater desalination that would provide the water needed for further petrochemical buildout in the Coastal Bend.
After Winter Storm Uri in February 2021, we developed the Texas Power to the People Pledge which lays out principles for policy makers to address the underlying issues that caused the grid failure. We organized meetings with legislative offices to request they sign the pledge, which also highlights excessive profiteering by some of the fracked gas companies that contributed to the catastrophic grid failure, and the lack of oversight by state agencies like the Texas Railroad Commission and Public Utility Commission.
Our community and coalition work over the past several years has contributed to the cancellation of Project Falcon, which was planned to be the largest ethane cracker facility in the world; the stoppage of work at Corpus Christi Polymers, which would have been the largest manufacturer of PET plastic in the country; the delay of five desalination plants in the Coastal Bend meant for industrial expansion; the indefinite suspension of a proposed crude oil export facility; the rejection by the Ingleside City Council of a local permit requested by Enbridge to build an ammonia facility; and the delay of more than a dozen other proposed new or expanded fossil fuel export facilities and related infrastructure.
In January 2024, the Biden Administration announced an unprecedented pause on approving new LNG export projects, the overwhelming majority of which would be located in Texas and Louisiana. After years of pressure, led by frontline activists and joined by hundreds of thousands of people from across the globe, the Department of Energy has committed to reevaluate how it determines whether or not LNG export projects are in the public interest. We will continue to work alongside our partners and allies to help ensure that Texas and the planet are protected from fossil fuel polluters.