‘Tired of being the city’s dumping ground’
SE Side pollution fighters alarmed by scrap shredder plan
A scrap metal shredder with a long history of pollution problems is moving from wealthy, largely white Lincoln Park to a lowincome, predominantly Latino neighborhood that already is heavily burdened by toxic waste and other environmental maladies.
General Iron Industries announced July 13 that it has brokered a deal to shutter its controversial scrap yard along the North Branch of the Chicago River and merge with a similar operation about 17 miles away in the East Side neighborhood.
The move will rid fast-gentrifying areas of Lincoln Park of metallic odors and unsightly piles of flattened cars, twisted rebar and used appliances. But community leaders near General Iron’s new home are angry and frustrated about the prospect of another source of air pollution in their corner of Chicago, which has struggled to recover since the steel industry abandoned the area during the 1980s and ’90s.
“We’re tired of being the city’s dumping ground,” said Chicago Ald. Sue Sadlowski Garza, 10th, who is the daughter of a prominent steelworkers union organizer and campaigned as a pollution-fighter when she ousted a key ally of Mayor Rahm Emanuel in 2015. “We want and deserve good things too.”
Under the deal, General Iron plans to move its shredding operation by 2020 to a portion of the former Republic Steel property off 116th Street between the Calumet River and Avenue O. Reserve Management Group, the company’s new Ohio-based partner, already operates a scrap-sorting facility at the site.
The pending move comes as General Iron faces intense pressure to leave the North Branch and is under investigation by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for the third time since the late 1990s. The EPA required General Iron to conduct detailed air pollution testing in May after researchers from the University of Illinois at Chicago found alarming levels of lung-damaging particulate matter downwind from the scrap shredder.
Activists on Chicago’s Southeast Side have been battling polluters for decades, initially focusing on landfills, toxic dumps and hazardous waste incinerators scattered around Lake Calumet and the ruins of steel mills that once employed tens of thousands of workers. To them, General Iron is just another potential neighbor with a less-than-stellar environmental record.
“Time and time again the city tries to bully us and stick us with everything the rest of Chicago doesn’t want,” said Peggy Salazar, director of the Southeast Environmental Task Force and a lifelong neighborhood resident. “It feels like we are playing Ping-Pong, but we’re trying to hit five balls coming at us with one paddle.”
The scrap merchants already are anticipating a backlash. In their announcement of the General Iron/RMG merger, the companies vowed to build a “European-style engineered enclosure containing noise and dust” from a new metal shredder that will be located about a half-mile from Washington High School and the closest residential area.
“General Iron and RMG are committed to being good neighbors and responsible stewards of the environment, and together will adopt measures to meet or exceed all environmental standards to provide the greatest protection to human health and the environment,” the companies said.
Randall Samborn, a crisis communications specialist hired by General Iron, later sent the Chicago Tribune another statement vowing to install new pollution controls at the North Branch site, transfer the equipment to the Southeast Side when the company moves and increase the number of sprinklers used to tamp down metallic dust.
Samborn, formerly chief spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago, noted General Iron’s new location is farther away from residential areas. About 6,800 people live within a mile of the Southeast Side site, compared with about 47,500 who live that close to the scrap shredder’s current operation west of Clybourn Avenue between North Avenue and Cortland Street.
In a bit of dark irony, major customers of General Iron and other scrap shredders are newer steel manufacturers that helped force the closure of sprawling, integrated mills on the Southeast Side that made steel from scratch. Often referred to as “mini-mills,” the smaller, more cost-effective operations melt scrap into new steel rather than using blast furnaces to melt iron.
General Iron promotes itself as a “green” company because it keeps scrap out of landfills. But while community organizers on the Southeast Side say residents tolerated pollution when the steel industry provided thousands of jobs, today they would rather see the kind of transformation unfolding on the North Branch next to General Iron’s current operation.
Surrounding the scrap shredder on three sides is Lincoln Yards, a multibillion-dollar mixed-use project from developer Sterling Bay planned on the former sites of steel mills, tanneries and other industries that dominated the area during most of the last century. Emanuel pitched Lincoln Yards as one of the Chicago sites for Amazon to build its second headquarters, which the company has said could employ up to 50,000 workers.
“Our community will remain stagnant if it isn’t improved and revitalized like the North Side,” said Salazar, who along with other South Side activists has been pushing the city to focus on more environmentally friendly businesses in other parts of the city. “We don’t need another polluting industry or another eyesore.”
For every victory community groups on the Southeast Side have achieved, organizers face new challenges and adversaries almost every year. And old problems keep oozing back into view.
During the early 2000s, groups fended off plans by Waste Management of Illinois to dump an additional 6 million tons of garbage in Chicago’s last open landfill, persuading aldermen to brush aside the company’s promise to turn the site into a park after filling a valley between two existing mounds of trash and debris along the Bishop Ford Expressway.
A few years later, another politically connected firm enlisted state lawmakers to back the redevelopment of an abandoned industrial site on the Calumet River for a factory that would have turned coal and petroleum coke into natural gas. Then-Gov. Pat Quinn vetoed the plan in 2012 after community groups pointed out the company would have relied on an inherently dirty process that would have sharply increased local air pollution.
The legislation also would have required Chicago-area ratepayers to subsidize the project, which otherwise would have been unable to compete in energy markets dominated by low-cost natural gas pulled directly from the ground.
At the same time the gasification plant was under consideration, other companies were making plans to turn the Southeast Side into one of the world’s biggest repositories for petroleum coke — a high-sulfur, high-carbon byproduct from the nearby BP refinery in Whiting and other plants processing Canadian oil that is thicker and dirtier than other grades.
A younger generation in the neighborhood gave its small-butsavvy community organizations a new boost of energy after gritty black clouds of dust repeatedly blew through the East Side during 2013, ruining summer picnics, interrupting Little League baseball games and prompting parents to keep their kids inside with the windows closed.
Alarming images of the pollution shared on Facebook prompted activists to dig into state archives for more information. They found records showing two sites that once stored coal and other raw materials on the Calumet River had been purchased by KCBX Terminals, a company controlled by the conservative industrialists Charles and David Koch that had secured permission from the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency to store up to 11 million tons of dusty petroleum coke in giant open-air piles.
“I was working in a migrant education program at the time and was in the last trimester with one of my girls,” said Olga Bautista, who helped form a group called the Southeast Side Coalition to Ban Petcoke. “We’ve learned so much since then about the challenges our community faces. Now we’re seeing people younger than me get active because they are tired of the bad smells and the nasty pollution.”
Faced with legal challenges from state and federal officials, and tougher regulations on bulk storage operations enacted by Emanuel’s administration, KCBX shuttered one of its sites in 2015 and later stopped storing petcoke at the other.
The KCBX investigation exposed problems with toxic manganese at S.H. Bell, another riverfront storage terminal that handles raw materials for steel mills in northwest Indiana. The EPA cited the company in August with violations of the federal Clean Air Act, and after a city contractor discovered nearby residential yards tainted with high levels of the potent neurotoxin, the federal agency announced in May that it would search for more contaminated yards.
Three other manganese-handling operations on the river also are under investigation.
More waste could be on the way. The city and the Army Corps of Engineers are eyeing five abandoned industrial properties on the Southeast Side for a new landfill to dispose of contaminated sediment dredged from the bottom of the Calumet River and Cal-Sag Channel.
Even the most promising redevelopment project in years on the Southeast Side has been tainted by the area’s toxic legacy.
Spanish and Irish developers had announced ambitious plans to build as many as 20,000 new homes on the site of the former U.S. Steel South Works, a 440-acre parcel on Lake Michigan with spectacular views of the Chicago skyline. Project renderings included retail and office space, parks, pedestrian and bike paths and waterfront walkways along boat docks.
But in April, the Spanish developer told the Chicago Tribune the project was on hold “because of soil contamination problems that need to be cleared.”
A month later, the other developer walked away from the deal. The site, where steel was made for the U.S. military during World War II and later in the construction of iconic Chicago skyscrapers, remains vacant.