Democratic presidential candidate Jay Inslee proposed banning the so-called forever chemicals contaminating millions of Americans drinking water as part of a sweeping environmental justice plan.

The Washington state governor vowed to enact regulations prohibiting the use of cancer-causing per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, common ingredients in nonstick fabrics, food packaging and firefighting foam that now pollute the drinking water of an estimated 19 million Americans.

The 36-page memo, released Monday ahead of the next set of Democratic primary debates in Detroit, provides a detailed look at how an Inslee administration would implement his grand vision of pulling ecological systems back from the brink of collapse while restoring health in poor, predominantly minority communities that bear the brunt of the last centurys pollution.

The governor has already sketched out how hed eliminate planet-heating emissions across major sectors over the next decade and challenged his competitors to oppose the Enbridge Line 5 proposal to build a new oil and gas pipeline under Michigans Straits of Mackinac.

The plan calls for reconstituting the Council on Environmental Quality , a sleepy White House department tasked with coordinating public health policy across federal agencies, as the Council on Environmental Justice. The new entity would ensure that people on the front lines have a role in informing federal policy and put justice and equity at the center of a national climate mobilization. It reiterates the Inslee campaigns earlier proposals to direct the Department of Justice to aggressively investigate and prosecute corporate polluters.

Income and race are strong indicators of how much pollution exposure an average American can expect to face. Air in Black communities is, on average, 48% more polluted than in wealthier, white neighborhoods, an NAACP report found last year, and they are 75% more likely to live in neighborhoods abutting industrial sites. Black, Hispanic and poor students face the highest risk of inhaling toxic pollutants in crumbling schools across the country, a study published last year in the journal Environmental Research.

I look at these two concepts as linked both in cause and solution, Inslee told HuffPost by phone Sunday. Its cause is pollution. Its solution is ending the dominance of fossil fuels.

Inslee also proposes a new federal Equity Impact Mapping program to track pollution hotspots, economic inequality and climate change impacts and suggests implementing an equity screen to analyze how federal climate, energy and environmental funding is spent in marginalized communities.