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Americas' Dirty Divide -New Toxic Plant in Chicago Sparks Hunger Strike
Americas' Dirty Divide - Pollution. New Toxic Plant in Chicago Minority Neighborhood Sparks Hunger Strike
A metal recycling plant is due to open on the polluted Southeast Side months after the same firm shut a metal scrapyard in a white, affluent part of town
The Guardian, 15 FEB, 2021.
Trinity Colón grew up believing everyone had asthma.
Raised among heavy industry on the Southeast Side of Chicago, Colón had no reason to believe otherwise: her entire family and neighbors shared the same respiratory issues. The rituals that came with them – like keeping windows shut to ward off billowing clouds of petroleum coke – seemed ordinary.
She remembers how once or twice a year, she would be driven to the clinic by her mother when her bronchitis would act up, to receive treatment her family often couldn’t afford.
Now Colón, 17, worries the health problems she and her community face are about to get worse. In December, a recycling company called Reserve Management Group (RMG) closed a century-old metal scrapyard in an affluent, white part of town after numerous environmental violations, and now the company is close to opening a new metal recycling plant in Chicago’s Southeast Side, where many black and brown people live. In an effort to stop the city from granting RMG its final permit, community activists have now announced a hunger strike.
The new recycling plant will house a metal shredder, which uses machinery known to produce hazardous dust particles that can cause severe heart and lung problems.
If Southside Recycling opens, that particulate matter “will be inhaled through the noses, throats, and lungs of my students”, said Chuck Stark, a high school science teacher who joined the hunger strike last week.
The Southeast Side of Chicago is the most industrial area of the city, home to businesses that dump more than a million pounds of toxins into the air every year. In August 2020, the city released an air quality report stating that the South and West Sides are “over-burdened” by “high concentrations of industry”. And yet, organizers say local officials have characterized their campaign to stop RMG from operating in their neighborhood as making a mountain out of a molehill.
“If [a metal shredder isn’t] not good enough for the North Side,” said Gina Ramirez, referring to the area where RMG previously operated General Iron, “then it’s not good enough for the South Side.”
The Southeast Side is a fenceline community – a term used to describe neighborhoods that are situated next to polluting industries or facilities. In this case, the community lives alongside multiple cement kilns, warehouses and toxic dumpsites. The area is home to two Environmental Protection Agency Superfund sites, which span 154 acres altogether and are highly contaminated with toxic metals. The area has also had major problems with petcoke (petroleum coke), manganese and lead.
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