Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s top public health official determined that a car-shredding operation will not open on the Southeast Side, ending an almost three-year battle between her administration and residents who said they can’t tolerate any more air pollution.
Southside Recycling, the renamed, relocated business formerly known as General Iron, was expecting to open about a year ago under an agreement with the city. Community organizers fought back, saying that the industrial Southeast Side already suffers from very poor air quality. The fact that the business was being moved from white, affluent Lincoln Park to a working-class Latino neighborhood surrounded by Black communities is racist, residents said. That claim drew a federal civil rights investigation that is ongoing.
The city’s public health department “finds that the facility proposes to undertake an inherently dangerous activity in a vulnerable community area, and the applicant failed to provide sufficient evidence that the facility can comply and stay in compliance with the terms and conditions of a permit, [municipal] code, or the rules as necessary to fully protect the residents of the Southeast Side,” Chicago Public Health Commissioner Dr. Allison Arwady said in a letter to the business owner.
Lightfoot appeared to be moving toward approving the final city permit Southside Recycling needed to operate when President Joe Biden’s top environmental official stepped in last May to ask the mayor to pause the process and conduct a health impact assessment. It was that assessment that Lightfoot’s administration cited in making the decision to deny the permit. Public health officials said this week that the new facility at East 116th Street along the Calumet River, close to schools, parks and homes, would add to air pollution.
The business owner, Reserve Management Group, sued the city for holding up the permit process and is asking for more than $100 million in damages.
Brett Chase’s reporting on the environment and public health is made possible by a grant from The Chicago Community Trust.
