The city of Chicago continued its fight to block Southside Recycling from operating a proposed metal shredding plant on the Southeast Side, filing an appeal Friday of a judge’s ruling that the clout-heavy company should be issued a permit.
An administrative law judge ruled in early June that Southside Recycling should be allowed to operate in Chicago’s heavily polluted Southeast Side — overturning one of former Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s central environmental justice efforts.
Her successor, Mayor Brandon Johnson, had promised to appeal the judge’s ruling and formally did so on Friday, noting the existing environmental hazards in that part of the city.
Johnson said his administration’s move to appeal was “guided in large part” by a health impact assessment by the Chicago Department of Public Health, with guidance from the federal Environmental Protection Agency “that found that certain census block groups in the Southeast Side community rank among the highest in Chicago for vulnerability to air pollution, based on underlying health and social conditions.”
The assessment also found that “community conditions on the Southeast Side have been affected by the presence of past and current industry, and that the proposed Southside Recycling facility would contribute additional negative impacts,” Johnson said in a June 1 statement, which his office reissued on Friday.
Ohio-based Reserve Management Group obtained all but one of the permits and zoning decisions it needed for its Southside Recycling operation. Then the administration of President Joe Biden 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, the parent company of Southside Recycling, 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.
