For decades, General Iron operated a metal recycling facility on the western edge of Chicago’s affluent Lincoln Park neighborhood. There, the company shredded automobiles, refrigerators, and other metal products and sold the scrap in the lucrative metal recycling market.
The company, though, was notorious for its pollution. In 2015, a fire broke out on the grounds, and in 2018, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued General Iron a citation for emitting air pollution that exceeded legal limits. In 2019, the company had to install air pollution reduction equipment. The following year, a fire started in the mechanism that controlled emissions from the automobile shredder, resulting in an explosion, for which the company was fined.
Ohio-based Reserve Management Group (RMG) acquired General Iron in 2019, and soon after, the company announced that it would move its metal-shredding operation to Chicago’s Southeast Side—a working-class community with a largely Latinx population.
Then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration cooperated with RMG on the move as part of a grand plan to redevelop the western edge of Lincoln Park into Lincoln Yards, a $6 billion mixed-use development that will include high-end residential and office buildings, and outdoor recreational areas. Expecting the relocation to proceed without any hitches, RMG rebranded General Iron as Southside Recycling and began building a new $80 million metal recycling facility at the site, where it already owned four other recycling operations.
So far, so good, right? Move a highly polluting company from Chicago’s affluent and white Lincoln Park neighborhood to a Latinx and African American community on the South Side. The “Chicago Way” appeared to be alive and well in the twenty-first century.
Despite the company’s plans, though, the good folks who live on the Southeast Side had other ideas. When RMG announced the move in 2019, residents were outraged that the city was allowing yet another noisy, smelly, and polluting facility to relocate to a community where industrial pollution already causes innumerable health and quality-of-life problems.
“We’ve been the dumping ground for everybody in the state of Illinois for so many decades,” Cheryl Johnson (no relation), executive director of People for Community Recovery, an organization that fights for environmental justice throughout the city, tells The Progressive. “There were a couple of public meetings that were superpacked. People showed their opposition to this. It just demonstrated what we’ve been fighting for decades—[it’s] what environmental racism looks like.” It was the beginning of a fight to prevent the city from issuing an operating permit to Southside Recycling.
The controversy dramatically underscores the pervasive issue of environmental racism in American cities. It has embroiled the administration of Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who succeeded Emanuel in 2019 after campaigning as a reformer. And it has fully engaged the EPA and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
According to the Chicago’s Air Quality and Health Report, “Some communities have rates of poverty, cardiovascular disease, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) that are ten times greater than others.”
But most of all, the issue has unified an extraordinary coalition of Chicago-based activists for environmental justice that includes the Southeast Environmental Task Force, People for Community Recovery, the Southeast Youth Alliance, Alliance of the Southeast, and the Chicago Environmental Justice Network.
For more than a century, the people of Chicago’s South Side have suffered from the toxic legacy of steel mills and other heavy industries. According to a study by the University of Illinois Chicago, the South Side and the south suburbs count more than 460 brownfields, 1,370 leaking underground storage locations, twelve hazardous waste sites, and nine closed landfills. Once Northwest Indiana is included, the tally includes at least 3,800 toxic waste sites, most of which have not been cleaned up.
The burden of this pollution falls primarily on Black and brown communities. In 2020, the City of Chicago released an Air Quality and Health Report that stated, “In Chicago, with its history of segregation and disinvestment in Black and Latinx communities, the differences between neighborhoods can be stark. Some communities have rates of poverty, cardiovascular disease, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) that are ten times greater than others.”
This toxic legacy galvanized Cheryl Johnson’s mother, Hazel Johnson, to found People for Community Recovery in 1979. The Johnson family lived in Altgeld Gardens, a public housing development on the far South Side that was built in 1945 for returning World War II veterans.
Hazel learned that their immediate area had the highest incidence of cancer of any neighborhood in the city. Cheryl recalls that her mother “made a connection between the air quality, the water quality, and the prior land use in this area that could [be linked to] some of those health problems.” By the late 1970s, the area surrounding Altgeld Gardens had suffered an astonishing fifty landfills, 250 leaky underground storage tanks, and more than 300 hazardous waste operations.
In 1994, Hazel Johnson—known to many as the mother of environmental justice—stood next to then-President Bill Clinton as he signed the “Federal Action to Address Environmental Justice in Minority Populations and Low Income Populations,” an executive order that aimed to bring federal attention to the issue of environmental racism.
The legacy of heavy industry was just as severe on the Southeast Side, and in 1989, activist Marian Byrnes founded the Southeast Environmental Task Force, or SETF, to tackle similar problems.
Over the years, SETF has been remarkably effective. In 2014, members of the group led protests against the local storage of petroleum coke, a noxious byproduct of tar sands oil, at a facility owned by the Koch brothers. Soon after, the city banned the storage of the dirty and dangerous substance.
When the relocation of Southside Recycling was announced, those at SETF knew the situation was urgent. The proposed site for the metal recycling plant would be in their neighborhood, less than a mile from the George Washington elementary school and high school. “We’re sick of having to put our lives on hold in order to fight back against a dangerous polluter because the state and city refuse to do their jobs,” SETF Executive Director Olga Bautista said in a press release in 2020. “[W]e need the city to step up and prevent this threat from coming to a vulnerable community.”
approved the move. Later that year, in October, the Lightfoot administration granted Southside Recycling the first city permit needed to begin operations. With this permit, RMG began to build the recycling operation. Throughout the process, city officials failed to inform the public that permits were being issued, despite promises that they would do so.
As the approval process proceeded, SETF worked in conjunction with the Natural Resources Defense Council, a national environmental organization, to stop the city from issuing a final permit to Southside Recycling. On February 4, 2021, multiple residents of the Southeast Side started a hunger strike to protest against the relocation. Soon, 300 residents, including teachers and students, joined the protests.
“We protested right in front of Mayor Lightfoot’s house,” Cheryl Johnson recalls. “She had to take accountability for this. We just did grassroots community organizing. Keeping people informed. Doing petitions. A letter-writing campaign. Building allies to support us. Going to [the Illinois state capitol in] Springfield. Going to City Hall. Protesting. This brought political pressure.”
“We protested right in front of Mayor Lightfoot’s house. She had to take accountability for this.”
The protests resounded all the way to Washington, D.C. In 2019, an EPA administrator toured pollution sites with members of the environmental justice community. In May 2021, the newly appointed head of the EPA, Michael Regan, wrote a letter to Mayor Lightfoot urging her administration to temporarily stop the review for the operating permit and to have the city’s Public Health Department conduct a review of the potential health consequences of the relocation for local residents. The city then announced that it would delay its decision on the final permit.
RMG responded by suing the city for $100 million and an operating permit. In June 2021, though, a federal judge rejected the lawsuit and the company’s claims that its Constitutional rights had been violated.
Finally, after months of demonstrations and a hunger strike, the protesters were victorious. On February 18, 2022, the Chicago Department of Public Health announced that it was denying RMG’s operating permit application, stating that the department “found the potential adverse changes in air quality and quality of life that would be caused by operations, and health vulnerabilities in the surrounding communities—together with the company’s track record in operating similar facilities within this campus—present an unacceptable risk.”
A spokesperson for the company, Randall Samborn, said at the time, “What should have been an apolitical permitting process was hijacked by a small but vocal opposition that [said] they would unconditionally oppose this facility, facts and science be damned.” According to the Chicago Sun-Times, RMG is currently involved in administrative hearings in an attempt to reverse the city’s decision.
Meanwhile, environmental justice groups have filed a complaint with HUD, alleging that Chicago’s pattern of siting industrial polluters violated the civil rights of Black and Latinx community members. HUD investigated, and last July, announced that it would require the city to revise its zoning and land-use policies. HUD threatened to withhold $375 million in funding from the city over the issue.
Writing in Crain’s Chicago Business last August, Bautista noted that “broken zoning laws are akin to the redlining that divided communities in major cities across the country. In places like my home city of Chicago, segregation is maintained, and in many cases deepened, by zoning laws that create sacrifice zones where industrial pollution is concentrated in communities of color.”
Environmental justice organizations want a new, sustainable direction for the South and Southeast sides of Chicago. “Let’s try to promote a green economy for our area,” says Cheryl Johnson. “Let’s look at supporting solar energy to get away from fossil fuels. Let’s look at thermal as a heating mechanism instead of using [natural] gas. Let’s get into Energy Star appliances. Let’s train the population that needs it the most. Let’s promote them to get those opportunities to be gainfully employed in these industries.”
In this way, perhaps the “Chicago Way” might finally start to change.