A clout-heavy scrap shredder should be allowed to operate in Chicago’s heavily polluted Southeast Side, an administrative law judge ruled Thursday in a decision that scrapped one of former Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s key overtures to the environmental justice movement.
The ruling by Administrative Law Judge Mitchell Ex noted a consultant hired by the city concluded Reserve Management Group’s shredder at 11600 S. Burley Ave. would not pose unacceptable cancer risks — defined by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as more than one case per million people during a lifetime.
Nor would the shredder increase the risk of other health problems, the city’s consultant said.
Ohio-based RMG obtained all but one of the permits and zoning decisions it needed for its Southside Recycling operation. Then the Biden administration urged Lightfoot to consider how the area’s existing pollution problems “epitomize the problem of environmental injustice” in low-income, predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods.
Faced also with a federal civil rights investigation and intense opposition from community activists, some of whom staged a hunger strike, Lightfoot short-circuited a 2019 deal she brokered with RMG to open the Southeast Side facility in return for closing the company’s often-troubled General Iron operation along the North Branch of the Chicago River near wealthy, mostly white Lincoln Park.
“It would be unjust and unfair for the city to spring unforeseen requirements at the last minute of the regulatory process to thwart Southside Recycling’s good faith reliance on the city’s approval to construct the (Southeast Side) facility,” Ex wrote in his 50-page opinion.
Ex concluded Lightfoot’s administration failed to prove RMG would cause more problems for the Southeast Side.
RMG has sued the city in local, state and federal courts. In a statement, the company said it would “continue pursuing all of our rights and remedies … to fully develop the facts supporting our claim for hundreds of millions of dollars in damages.”
Mayor Brandon Johnson said the city will appeal Ex’s decision “and continue our fight to uphold our authority under the law to make decisions that protect the environment, health and quality-of-life for residents of the 10th Ward and all environmental justice communities.”
Three neighborhoods near the RMG shredder — East Side, Hegewisch and South Deering — are scarred by 250 contaminated sites left behind when the steel industry abandoned the once-prosperous corner of Chicago during the 1980s and ‘90s, EPA Administrator Michael Regan noted in a May 2021 letter to Lightfoot.
More than 75 polluters in the area have been investigated for Clean Air Act violations since 2014 alone, including companies that contaminated yards and playgrounds with brain-damaging manganese and lung-damaging petroleum coke.
[ High manganese levels lead EPA to crack down on Southeast Side polluter ]
Biden and Regan came into office pledging to address the nation’s long-standing racial disparities, in particular the concentration of dirty industries in poor communities of color.
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In one of her last decisions as mayor, Lightfoot signed an agreement with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development vowing the city would overhaul its zoning policies, which over time have tended to concentrate polluting industries in low-income, predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods.
General Iron lost special zoning protections under former Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who backed the transformation of industrial properties along the North Branch of the Chicago River into the upscale Lincoln Yards development.
RMG’s shredder on the Calumet River, built on the ruins of the former Republic Steel mill, is in another Planned Manufacturing District that includes several of the city’s biggest polluters. People living nearby breathe some of the city’s dirtiest air, monitoring data shows.
“This is a classic example of environment racism in Chicago,” said Cheryl Johnson, executive director of the nonprofit People for Community Recovery. “This decision once again puts profits over people.”
As neighbors in Lincoln Park increasingly complained about metallic odors, General Iron and its former owners, the Labkon family, spread more than $500,000 in political contributions among Emanuel, aldermanic candidates and other local politicians, according to campaign finance records.
The family also hired a dozen City Hall lobbyists, including John Borovicka, who worked for Emanuel when the former mayor was a congressman; Victor Reyes, a former political operative for Mayor Richard M. Daley; and John R. Daley, son of Cook County Commissioner John Daley and the former mayor’s nephew.
