Sugar Company That Fills The Everglades With Smoke For Months Every Year Sued For Greenwashing Claims

[hatrack]

A major sugar company has been accused of harmful environmental practices while claiming to be a leader in the fight against the climate crisis, in a class-action lawsuit filed on Wednesday. Florida Crystals, one of the US’s biggest sugar firms, and its parent company, the Fanjul Corporation, are accused of deceiving consumers and endangering public health by continuing to use environmentally harmful pre-harvest burning.

The accusations come while the firm has been branding its products as the nation’s eco-friendly sugar option, according to the lawsuit filed in the US district court for the northern district of California.

According to the court filing, the sugar company’s leaf-burning practices “emit substantial volumes of greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change as well as toxic particulate matter (PM2.5), dioxins, carbon monoxide, ammonia, elemental carbon, and volatile organic compounds that fill the air of the Florida Glades region on a daily basis during the six-to-eight-month harvesting season, poisoning local residents, who are disproportionately poor and people of color.”

In order to remove excess leaves before harvesting, sugarcane growers have two options: slashing, also known as green harvesting – which is cleaner but requires investment in machinery – or burning, which is cheaper on the front end but causes harm to the environment and public health. Yet Florida Crystals, in partnership with the Fanjul Corporation, markets itself as the country’s most environmentally conscious and climate-friendly sugar company, the lawsuit alleges.

EDIT

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/05/florida-crystals-sugar-lawsuit

[sop]

1. The Fanjuls are known as the "first family of corporate welfare."

"Jose Fanjul and his family own a sugar harvesting and refining empire, including a majority stake in Domino Sugar. Since the 1980s, the sugar industry has enjoyed billions of dollars in annual subsidies from the federal government, which guarantees high prices for domestic sugar. This makes sugar farming much more profitable than other kinds of farming and forces American consumers to spend twice as much for sugar compared to other countries. Fanjul is a prolific donor to Republican causes to preserve these subsidies."

Fanjul contributed over $800,000 to the Trump campaign.

[Comrade Citizen]

2. When TX grew sugarcane up until 2024

you did not want to be downwind when they were burning the cane fields