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Richard L. Martinez, Jr., is the Acting Diversity Administrator, of the Diversity Section of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago.
- Overview
- Recycling firm moving in
- Rising opposition
- A disproportionate burden
CHICAGO — For more than a century, industries have shaped the banks of the Calumet River on Chicago’s Southeast Side, creating a gritty economic corridor of trucking and cement companies, manufacturing plants and scores of salvage yards that spew metallic dust from scrap piles.
Each breath near the packed lines of factories feels heavy.
Yet, the prevailing view had been how those employers create well-paying, blue-collar jobs, and jobs are good for this largely Latino enclave, said Richard Martinez, a pastor at Nehemiah Family Fellowship Church and third-generation Southeast Sider, whose family worked for the factories.
But now, Martinez and a coalition of residents are pushing back: A proposal to open a scrap metal plant along the Calumet has sparked protests and a legal battle with the city, as well as reignited criticism that access to a cleaner environment for vulnerable communities of color is being sacrificed in favor of industry. The federal government on Monday said it was opening an environmental justice investigation into the state’s approval last June of a permit for the project.
The stakes remain especially high, community activists say, after the Chicago area last summer experienced its longest streak of high-pollution days in more than a decade, coming amid the coronavirus pandemic that has underscored persistent racial health and economic disparities nationwide. The mostly Latino residents on the Southeast Side of Chicago suffer from a disproportionate share of health problems compared to other areas of the city.
“I don’t consider myself an environmentalist,” Martinez, 48, said. “But as a pastor and a father, whatever we allow in our community has to be a blessing to the land and to our health and to future generations.”
Martinez is a plaintiff in a federal lawsuit opposing a permit application filed by Reserve Management Group, a metals and electronics recycling firm seeking to operate a new facility, Southside Recycling, that can transform up to 1 million tons of unwanted metal products annually.
The Chicago Department of Public Health, however, must approve a key operating permit, giving the public until Friday to comment. The health department in September granted an air pollution control permit for the site, but drew criticism from Southeast Side residents who felt blindsided by the approval, citing how the area is already overburdened with environmental toxicity.
Reserve Management Group acquired control of another scrap metal plant, General Iron, on Chicago’s North Side in the fall of 2019. Previously, General Iron was a family-owned business that launched in the early 1900s, shredding and recycling discarded automobiles, appliances and other materials.
But in recent years, the North Side site was the subject of several dozen complaints about air pollution, strong odors, noise and smoke, and even explosions, prompting citations and protests over health concerns and spurring residents’ demands that city officials shut down the facility.
Instead, Reserve Management Group agreed to a city-approved “exit plan” that involved vacating General Iron’s longtime home in the North Side’s Lincoln Park, a majority white neighborhood and one of the most affluent in Chicago, by the end of 2020, and reopening operations to its existing site on the Southeast Side. It is unclear if any other site was considered.
Addressing the controversy, Reserve Management Group CEO Steve Joseph wrote in a letter to the editor in the Chicago Sun-Times in November that he welcomed the chance to be held accountable during the permitting process and the project has “created hundreds of construction jobs and will keep more than 100 well-paying jobs in the city.”
Protests heated up in 2018 outside of the General Iron facility in Lincoln Park. Residents said they were fed up with the sound of crunching metal, irritating metallic smells and dark particles that landed on their porches and patios, so-called fugitive dust from the 60,000 tons of scrap metal recycled at the plant each month.
That same year, federal regulators issued a notice of violation to the company for excessive air emissions, which led to an agreement to install additional pollution controls. The Environmental Protection Agency found that several hazardous air pollutants, including zinc, mercury and lead, were present in the exhaust gases at detectable levels, although the rates were still “low compared to EPA emission limits.”
Roni-Nicole Facen, an educator who last year became principal of St. Francis de Sales High School on the Southeast Side, was unaware of General Iron until the protests two years ago. She heard about the early discussions to move its operations to her neighborhood, and students’ families began asking what a new scrap metal facility would mean for them.
The proposed site is a half-mile away from an elementary school, high school and several little league baseball fields.
“If it wasn’t good enough for Lincoln Park, why wasn’t it not good enough for us?” Facen, who is Hispanic and Black, asked.
Facen joined Martinez in a complaint filed in the fall in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois against the city, which includes Mayor Lori Lightfoot and the health department as defendants. The suit alleges the city’s support to “relocate” General Iron’s operations amounts to a “racially-discriminatory decision.”
The steel industry was once the lifeblood of the Southeast Side before the mills shuttered for good in the 1980s and the ‘90s. Other factories and assembly plants still operate or have expanded.
Salazar, the head of the Southeast Environmental Task Force, one of the groups that pushed for the opening of the HUD investigation involving General Iron, laments how her quality of life has significantly diminished over the decades. She blames the lingering effects of industrial pollution.
“We don’t go outside and enjoy the outdoors or even sit in our yard because of some of the putrid smells that are constantly blowing in our direction,” she said.
Health indicators suggest the extent of the disproportionate burden on area residents: About 15 percent of the adult population in South Deering, the neighborhood where the Southside Recycling plant is proposed to open, suffers from asthma, according to Illinois Department of Public Health data from 2016-18. In the wealthier Near North Side, the rate is less than 3 percent, while the rate citywide is 9.5 percent.
“In Chicago, with its history of segregation and disinvestment in Black and Latinx communities, the differences between neighborhoods can be stark,” according to a 2020 Chicago Department of Public Health report, which found some of those communities have rates of poverty, cardiovascular disease and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease that are 10 times higher than others. The report also found that air quality on Chicago’s Southeast Side ranked among the worst in the city.
While Salazar and local grassroots groups have fought for environmental protections before and were able to gain new regulations for the storage and handling of harmful substances, she said many residents don’t expect much to change.
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