Trinity Colón grew up believing that everyone had asthma.
Raised among the heavy industry in southeast Chicago, Colón had no reason to believe otherwise: his entire family and neighbors shared the same breathing problems. The rituals that came with them – how to keep the windows closed to ward off the clouds of petroleum coke – seemed common.
She remembers how, once or twice a year, she was taken to the clinic by her mother when her bronchitis worsened, to receive treatment that her family often could not afford.
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Now Colón, 17, worries about the health problems she and her community are facing are about to get worse. In December, a recycling company called Reserve Management Group (RMG) closed a century-old junkyard in a rich, white part of the city after numerous environmental violations, and now the company is close to opening a new metal recycling plant in the southeast. of Chicago, where many blacks and browns live. In an effort to prevent the city from granting RMG its final license, community activists have now announced a hunger strike.
The new recycling plant will house a metal shredder, which uses machinery known to produce dangerous dust particles that can cause serious heart and lung problems.
If Southside Recycling opens, the particulate material “will be inhaled through my students’ nose, throat and lungs,” said Chuck Stark, a high school science teacher who joined the hunger strike last week.
The southeastern side of Chicago is the most industrial area of the city, home to companies that pour 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 “overwhelmed” by “high concentrations of industry”. Even so, organizers say local authorities have characterized their campaign to prevent RMG from operating in its neighborhood like building a small hill on a mountain.
“If [a metal shredder] it’s not good enough for the North Side, ”said Gina Ramirez, referring to the area where RMG previously operated General Iron,“ so it’s not good enough for the South Side ”.
The Southeast Zone is a fenced community – a term used to describe neighborhoods that are located close to polluting industries or facilities. In this case, the community lives next to several cement kilns, deposits and toxic dumps. The area is home to two Environmental Protection Agency Superfund sites, which span a total of 154 acres and are highly contaminated with toxic metals. The area also had major problems with petroleum coke (petroleum coke), manganese and lead.
RMG’s new recycling plant would pose additional health risks. CEP 60617, which includes most of the Southeast Zone, already had the largest number of emergency calls related to asthma (for children under 19) in 2017. On this front, the RMG registry is not exactly clean – residents organized General Ferro for years due to EPA violations and complaints of noise, toxic air and health problems.
And the health consequences are not just physical: several studies have shown that even the visual effects of living among the industry – streams of diesel trucks, clouds of smoke – can cause a “higher prevalence of depression and anxiety,” said Dr Susan Buchanan, professor of public health at the University of Illinois-Chicago.
Residents say the city government allowing the opening of Southside Recycling is another example of Chicago prioritizing profits over people’s needs – and meeting the needs of white residents over those of black and Latino communities. In the past few months, the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development and the EPA have launched civil rights investigations into whether housing discrimination and environmental racism may have influenced change.
Over the past two years, organizers on the southeast side have held city halls and led protests to clarify the dangers of industrial pollution. They say Mayor Lori Lightfoot encouraged the RMG to move south to make way on the north side for Lincoln Yards, a controversial mega-development that is expected to add luxury businesses and luxury homes to the area.
“It looks like the city served as General Iron’s gatehouse,” said Ramirez, who has lived on the East Side his entire life.
A city spokesman said he “worked with stakeholders – including groups representing the Southeast Zone – to create new and stricter rules for large recycling facilities.” The goal is to help communities most affected by pollution and “will continue to work to address residents’ concerns,” said the spokesman.
Ramirez’s family has deep roots in the city; his great-grandfather immigrated to Chicago in the 1930s to work at US Steel, where his grandfather and father later worked. She saw how environmental racism has been perpetuated in her community for years.
“Other parts of the city are turning green and [getting] sustainable infrastructure – changing over time – and my neighborhood is stuck in the industrial revolution, ”said Ramirez, who works as a midwestern extension manager for the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Ramirez’s mother developed asthma after years of living near US Steel, and Ramirez has yet to tell his immunocompromised son to close the window while she drives.
“It smells terrible here and you don’t know [which] industry, because there are too many to count. There are bicycle trails close to the Superfund sites. There are asthma vans outside our schools all the time. It is a scary place to live at the end of the day. “
It is no exaggeration to say that the workforce that left the southeast side of Chicago built the city.
Until 40 years ago, the Southeast Side of Chicago was an industrial power. By the turn of the 20th century, the area had become an important manufacturing hub, rivaling cities like Pittsburgh with jobs in steel production that attracted immigrants to the region with the promise of stable work and good wages. The John Hancock Center and Sears Tower were built with steel from South Works, an old steel mill located in the South Chicago neighborhood.
But the job promise came at a price. “You couldn’t breathe, it was very polluted,” said Dominic A Pacyga, a historian in the Southeast. “Women hung up her clothes and she was covered in silicon dust.”
When manufacturing was moved abroad in the 1980s, Chicago’s steel industry basically disappeared overnight, says Pacyga – and the Southeast Side, which is now mostly black and Latin, has been fighting since then, without adequate investment city and local commerce. The neighborhood is characterized by high voltage power lines, bridges built for diesel trucks, an elevated six-lane highway and several brownfields that need remediation.
Today, activists feel that industry and city leaders are taking advantage of the economic situation in the Southeast – using the promise of jobs to cover up the health and environmental effects of living alongside a major polluter.
In a statement to the Guardian, an RMG spokesman, Randall Samborn, said that “the neighborhood’s racial, ethnic and income demographics” did not influence Southside Recycling’s location. He said the metal recycler would create about 100 jobs for “predominantly minorities who earn head of household wages”, calling the facility “state of the art”.
But Olga Bautista, co-founder of the local environmental group Southeast Side Coalition to Ban Petcoke, refers to RMG’s claims as “greenwashing”. Nearby, George Washington High School has observed the highest levels of cadmium in the state since construction began, and Colón says his colleagues are enrolling in high schools further north to escape the area.
The nature of these businesses makes total control of emissions difficult, even with regulations.
“In general, these industries … should not be located where people live,” said Dr. Buchanan. “It shouldn’t matter what kind of residence it is, what color they are, or what their income is.”
Crystal Guerra, who was inspired to start the Bridges / Puentes community group last year after planning local protests against police brutality, sees pollution in the Southeast as a matter of racial justice not unlike movements like Black Lives Matter.
Instead of social services and incentives for green businesses, the city’s resources are going to institutions that harm its community, Guerra argues. “We want a positive investment, not a punitive investment.”
The hunger strike, now on its 11th day, may seem extreme – but the organizers were inspired by education activists who, in 2015, refused to eat solid food for 34 days and lobbied to reopen Dyett College in the neighborhood of Bronzeville.
Southeast organizers have asked other community organizations to support them by going on a one-day hunger strike and are sharing updates on Twitter. In total, six people have pledged to go on a hunger strike until the city denies RMG its final license – however long it may be.
But the physical consequences of a hunger strike are real. All participants were examined clinically and taught to check their vital signs before starting the fluid-only diet. Oscar Sanchez, co-founder of the Southeast Youth Alliance and a native of the Hegewisch neighborhood, said that in the early days he was full of doubts.
“Am I doing enough? Am I tweeting enough? Are we putting our faces out there enough? “he said, on his fifth day of the hunger strike.
Sanchez said he had already acclimated and the support from the community he received only underscored the importance of the hunger strike. “If we need to put our lives at risk,” said Sanchez, “we do it because it is for our current generation, our future generation and our ancestors.”