Activists are vowing to keep fighting a metal scrapper from operating in their community.
Chicago Department of Public Health officials determined last year the operation posed an “unacceptable risk” to the health of nearby residents, following Environmental Protection Agency investigations and activism from local residents who said their neighborhood could not withstand the pollution they believe the new Southside Recycling facility will bring.
However an administrative law judge has now ruled that the "Reserve Management Group," known as RMG, does meet the requirements for the permit it needs to operate Southside Recycling — a metal shredding and recycling operation — on the Southeast Side.
Mayor Brandon Johnson's team has since told WTTW News they’re actively working on an appeal.
But for Oscar Sanchez, community planning manager for the Southeast Environmental Task Force, the issue is deeply personal.
“My own family has been affected by respiratory issues. My brother had to wear a mask from 5-years-old to 10-years-old to be able to sleep at night. My grandparents both just passed away due to respiratory issues,” Sanchez said. “My grandmother having holes in her lungs. My story is not uncommon. These are stories throughout the 10th Ward, throughout the Southeast Side … this is a story that we are not statistics to this life expectancy. We are living, breathing community members.”
Cheryl Johnson, executive director of People for Community Recovery, says she’s been doing this work for 40 years and feels like she’s “at ground zero.”
“There’s progress being done all around this country, but here in Chicago, you can cut it with a knife how deep environmental racism goes,” she said. “We’re fighting to change the mindset of that. It’s not business as usual like it used to be in the city of Chicago. We’re standing up and we’re demanding our rights … It’s unbearable to say they follow the rules and the guidelines because those rules can be broken and adjusted before the reporting requirement.”
RMG denied “Chicago Tonight’s” invite to join the discussion due to an ongoing litigation, but sent a statement saying in part: “As confirmed in the administrative appeal, the city’s own air quality expert, Tetra Tech, a nationally respected independent consultant, concluded that calculated risks from the proposed facility to the nearby residential community are less than the U.S. EPA benchmarks for both cancer — less than one case per million people during a lifetime — and non-carcinogenic hazards.
"The facts are that Southside Recycling followed the city’s strict rules that were adopted in 2020 with this project in mind after a lengthy public process," the statement continued, "and our environmental controls perfectly match a 2021 U.S. EPA enforcement alert that details best practices in the metal shredding industry.”
Sanchez says it's not just about Southside Recycling, but rather taking a look at the whole picture and the “cumulative impact.”
“For us, when we talk about big companies following the regulations and zoning, it doesn’t matter," Sanchez said. "The same thing can be said about Petcoke. It was held to those standards. But we are living and experiencing these health defects … we hope the executive order of Lori Lightfoot continues to be a tool to uplift health in looking at the whole picture of demographics, of age, race, poverty … taking into consideration all the factors when it comes to permitting processes. When you look at that, the administrative judge did not look at the public health lenses that are necessary to uplift our health.”
