Waste Dumps Toxic Traps for Minorities

By: Linc CohenWhile the crowds that gather in Daley Plaza the April 22 celebration of Earth Day likely to be mostly white, Chicago's minority neighborhoods bear the brunt of environmental hazards.

"Environmental racism"-the idea that minority communities are hit hardest by pollution and have little power over the polluters-is the new cause of a growing number of reconstituted civil rights and community groups.

In Chicago and elsewhere, activists are choosing the locations of dumps and incinerators and helping control the emissions of dangerous chemicals. They also are prodding environmental organizations and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to work more closely with minorities.

The focus of most white environmentalists is too narrow, said Dr. Linda Murray, former chief of the city's Bureau of Comprehensive Environmental/Public Health. "Some of the groups that are worried about the spotted owl don't realize black males are an endangered species," Murray said.

Gloria Scott, a community activist opposing an incinerator project in the all-black Village of Robbins, said poor communities are targeted for projects no one wants in their own back yards. "I think they figured black folks aren't going to fight back. They think we are too busy trying to scratch out a living," Scott said.

Illinois Attorney General Roland Burris, who has filed suit against the incinerator's developer, said, "You don't have to be around for long to know which areas are more likely to have industrial and waste disposal facilities."

An investigation by The Chicago Reporter backs up that claim:

• One of the five worst concentrations of toxic waste in the nation is on Chicago's South Side. Of the city's 162 toxic "hot spots," recorded by the EPA in March, 99 are in ZIP codes that are at least 65 percent minority and 98 are on the South Side.

• In 1989, the last year for which figures are available, five of the six Chicago ZIP codes with the highest toxic releases by industry were at least 78 percent minority.

• Of the 10 community areas with the highest incidence of lead poisoning among children, all were at least 70 percent minority, a 1990 Chicago Department of Health study found. Of the 485 cases studied, 94 percent affected minorities. A follow-up study will be released this summer.

• Established national environmental groups have been slow to focus on environmental racism, and have few minority staffers. Minorities make up 18.2 percent of the staffs of I I national organizations surveyed by the Reporter.

• Illegal dumping plagues the city's minority neighborhoods. The 24 city wards that are 65 percent or more minority account for nearly 80 percent of the tonnage of illegal garbage.

Toxic Doughnut
No matter which way the wind is blowing, unpleasant odors waft through Altgeld Gardens, a housing project on Chicago's Southeast Side. To the west, the coke ovens at Acme Steel Co. spew benzene and other poisons into the toxic mix. To the south is suburban Dolton's municipal landfill; to the east, the CID Corp. landfill, owned by Waste Management Inc., processes garbage and hazardous waste. To the north, near 130th Street and Stony Island Avenue, beds of sewage sludge are spread daily at a Chicago Metropolitan Water Reclamation District facility.

"We live in a toxic doughnut," said Hazel M. Johnson, one of about 8,000 residents in the all-black project, ironically nicknamed "The Gardens."

Only four Chicago landfills take hazardous wastes, all on the far Southeast Side: Paxton Land Fill Corp., at 122nd Street and Torrence Avenue; Land & Lakes Co., at 12200 S. Stony Island Ave. and 13416 S. Indiana Ave.; and CID Corp., at 138th Street and the Calumet Expressway.

But landfills are only the beginning of the story. The area has been a regional dumping ground for at least a century. The old company town of Pullman, now a Chicago neighborhood, once dumped its waste on the spot where Altgeld Gardens now stands. Aging industries have long poured pollution into the air, and closed and rusting factories hide hazardous waste piles, drums and tanks, leaking toxic contents into the ground.

The federal EPA monitors sites where hazardous wastes have been dumped or stored through its Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act Information System.

In March, Chicago had 162 hot spots on the CERCLIS list-99 are in ZIP codes that are at least 65 percent minority. ZIP code 60608, which includes parts of the West Side, tops the list with 14 sites. The area is 81 percent minority. There are 13 sites in ZIP code 60622, which includes West Town and is 73 percent minority.

The Southeast Side has 42 sites. ZIP codes 60617 and 60628, which include South Deering and Pullman, each have 12 hot spots. 60617 is 82 percent black and Latino; 60628 is 95 percent black.

The EPA can order a cleanup for the worst toxic waste sites, paid for by the Superfund, an environmental endowment financed by industry and government.

Because Chicagoans drink Lake Michigan water instead of ground water that may be contaminated by toxic dumps, the city has been ineligible for Superfund money. EPA officials said they plan to reevaluate the Chicago sites, but have set no specific timetable.

Lead Perils
Lead poisoning is one of the city's greatest environmental perils, particularly among minority children.

Even very low exposure to lead can cause disabilities such as mental retardation and hearing loss. Children are exposed to lead through old paint on walls and from drinking water that comes through lead pipes. Lead gasoline emissions from cars and lead dust from factories can end up in the soil where children play.

A 1990 Chicago Department of Health study found that 10 predominantly minority communities recorded the highest levels of lead poisoning. The study was based on blood tests taken from August 1988 through August 1989. The department tested 76,801 children in 1991. Blacks and Hispanics were disproportionately affected even in non-minority neighborhoods, the study found. While blacks make up only 37 percent of New City on the West Side, they accounted for 76 percent of the lead poisoning cases. And in West Town, which is 57 percent Hispanic, Latinos had 78 percent of the cases.

Getting Together
After her husband died of lung cancer in 1969, Johnson started hearing about other cancer cases at Altgeld Gardens. By the summer of 1982, she was knocking on doors, talking about pollution.

Her efforts produced People for Community Recovery, a group that organizes Gardens' residents around health and environmental issues. In 1985, PCR joined a campaign to block the proposed expansion of Waste Management's CID landfill. With help from Greenpeace, the international environmental organization, PCR organized a demonstration to block trucks from entering the landfill in July 1987.

Mayor Harold Washington had pushed a one-year moratorium on new or expanded landfills through the Chicago City Council in February 1984. The ordinance, which was extended several times, is now in effect until February 1994.

PCR, Greenpeace and other groups also faced off in 1986 with the conglomerate's subsidiary, Chemical Waste Management Inc., in a protracted battle over federal Clean Air Act violations at its II 700 S. Stony Island Ave. incinerator. The company paid $7.2 million in penalties between 1980 and 1991, and made a $500,000 contribution to an environmental education program.

A 1987 investigation by the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency found that incinerator operators were turning off stack monitors to thwart federal requirements. The agency trained community residents-including Hazel Johnson's daughter, Valerie-to monitor stack emissions. They found more violations.

In September 1990 Chemical Waste Management agreed to pay $3.75 million in civil penalties and spend up to $350,000 for new monitoring equipment.

The incinerator has been closed since an explosion in February 1991, but a new permit is pending.

"We had problems in the past, that's obvious," company spokesman Bob Reincke said. "They've been corrected, our penalties paid and we are closely monitored."

Chemical Waste Management's plant, which is located in the predominantly minority neighborhood of South Deering, has other facilities in minority areas. Four of its incinerators are in downstate Sauget, which is 73 percent black; it has another in Port Arthur, Texas, which is 40 percent black and 6 percent Latino; and the company plans an incinerator in Kettleman City, Calif., which is 95 percent Latino.

Since the firm bought the plants from other companies, they had no control over their locations, Reincke said.

Recycled Toxins
The harsh odor of chlorine frequently greets Veronica Cadena in the early morning air outside her home in the Back of the Yards. She blames Safety-Kleen Corp., which recycles contaminated oils and solvents at its plant at 1445 W. 42nd St.

Cadena, who lives a few blocks away, fears an explosion or toxic spill. After Safety-Kleen completed a $13 million expansion in August, Cadena and a group of neighborhood mothers called Nosotras challenged the company's application for a permanent EPA permit to handle toxins.

Nosotras and other neighborhood residents turned to Citizens for a Better Environment, a local watchdog group, which helped them prepare testimony for state hearings on the permit and draft a "good neighbor agreement" with the company.

At a March 15 meeting with Safety-Kleen, residents demanded unannounced inspections, an independent safety expert, and the right to review pollution control plans. They also asked the company to encourage its customers to reduce their use of toxic substances and to shorten the EPA permit from 10 to three years. Facilities Plant Manager Alfred Aghaiepour agreed to form a citizens advisory committee, but declined the other proposals.

The activists were furious. "You've got the jobs, we take the risks," one angry resident said at the meeting.

"The residents didn't seem to understand some of the things they were asking for," said Paul Wyche, Safety-Kleen's director of communications. "We wondered who had advanced those demands."

Wyche said their talks will eventually satisfy most of the community's demands. But Cadena is skeptical.

"The company has so much money. They think we are so poor that we can't fight them," she said. "They think we are stupid because we are women and Mexican and don't speak good English."

But she added hopefully: "A little bit today, a little bit the next day. Maybe someday we'll have something."

Good neighbor agreements allow local groups to talk to industry and reassures residents who fear plant shutdowns if they press too hard for cleanups.

"We've tried it the other way," said Andrew Comai, a CBE policy analyst. "We could have [some companies] shut down, but once you get the EPA and regulatory agencies involved, there's no citizen participation at all."

With help from the South Chicago Legal Clinic, CBE has organized a series of workshops on how to locate toxic hot spots and work with corporate polluters. The clinic, which started an environmental law program in 1989, publishes a newsletter and environmental law manuals, and holds "toxic watch" seminars. It currently has 85 open cases, and 80 percent of its clients are minorities, said staff attorney Keith Harley. 'We help the ordinary person who lives next door to a dump," he said.

Deadly Trap
In December 1985, Union Carbide Corp. accidentally released a deadly cloud of cyanide gas from its plant in Bhopal, India, killing 2,000 people. In October 1986, the U.S. Congress passed legislation known as the Community Right to Know Act, which established the Toxic Release Inventory.

Companies must report annually the regulated toxins that come from their stacks, what they discharge into waterways, as well as any spills, leaks and other materials they transfer by truck or tanker.

Of the six ZIP codes with the most releases, five are more than 78 percent minority. And confirming Hazel Johnson's "toxic doughnut" analogy, three of the six ZIP codes are adjacent to Altgeld Gardens.

ZIP code 60628, just north of the Gardens, is 98 percent black. Toxic releases and transfers there totaled 5.2 million pounds in 1989. The biggest producer of toxins in the area, with 4.6 million pounds, was the PMC Specialties Group, a chemicals and ink producer at 735 E. 115th St. The area also houses Sherwin Williams Co., a paint manufacturer at 11541 S. Champlain Ave., with 139,272 pounds.

The city's highest toxic total in 1989 was 5.5 million pounds in ZIP code 60617, which is 82 percent minority and includes portions of South Chicago, South Deering, Calumet Heights and the East Side. Southworks, the U.S. Steel plant at 79th Street and Brandon Avenue that is closing this month, was responsible for 4.7 million pounds, or 85 percent of the totals for the area.

CBE says this information can help citizens spot problem chemicals or facilities in their neighborhoods before trouble occurs and demand that plant managers take measures to ensure safer operation.

Mammoth Effort
When Johnson began knocking on doors in Altgeld Gardens, "people said I was crazy," she recalled. But a decade later, federal officials decided to assess the health consequences of living in southeast Chicago. Local residents first petitioned the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry in 1988, and the agency agreed last summer to take on the project. To assist them, the federal officials created a Community Assistance Panel of local health researchers and people who live and work in the area.

PCR's Cheryl Johnson hopes the assessment will prod the EPA to combine all 42 CERCLIS sites in Southeast Chicago into a single Superfund site. An EPA spokesman, William D. Messenger, said that solution wasn't likely, but added that some sites may be eligible under the new regulations.

Other panel members have doubts about the assessment. "It's a mammoth task," said Linda Murray, who volunteers at Cook County Hospital's occupational health division. Unless ATSDR researchers can show cause and effect, she said, the study will not spur a cleanup.

Murray cites a 1989 Illinois Department of Public Health study that found higher-than-expected cancer rates in ZIP codes 60627 and 60628. The high level of toxic pollutants in the areas allowed researchers to conclude that the cancers were caused by exposure to the chemicals. But other factors, such as diet and cigarette smoking, make the study less reliable, she said.

Panel member Robert Ginsburg, a chemist and toxicologist who does environmental consulting, said the study should have considered poor nutrition, joblessness, drinking and drugs along with pollution. "How can you separate all those out?" he asked. "Poverty makes you sick. Unemployment makes you sick."

Dr. Cynthia M. Harris, chief of ATSDR's community health section, said the agency wants to make the assessment as accurate as possible. "We need to find out if pollution is disproportionately affecting the health of minority communities," she said. "The [Southeast Chicago] study needs to be handled diligently. This is a challenge and we've taken it on."

Environmental justice
More than 500 people attended the First National People of Color Leadership Summit on the Environment, convened last October in Washington, D.C. by the Rev. Benjamin F. Chavis, executive director of the United Church of Christ's Commission for Racial Justice.

The idea of environmental racism was advanced by the UCCs 1987 report "Toxic Waste and Race in the United States." The study concluded that race determined the location of commercial hazardous waste landfills more than any other factor, including income, property value and the level of toxic waste an area generated. It also found that three out of every five blacks and Latinos lived in communities with toxic hot spots on the EPRs CERCLIS list.

The summit "tied the environmental movement to people's everyday lives," Murray said. 'We are struggling with how issues of the land overlap with traditional environmental health-issues Uke rat control, housing, nutrition, lead poisoning."

In March 1990, Chavis and other environmental justice advocates wrote to the "Group of Ten" largest environmental organizations, charging that they supported "the cleanup and preservation of the environment on the backs of working people in general and people of color in particular."

They demanded a meeting with the environmental groups and insisted that they halt their operations in minority communities until at least 35 percent of their staffs were minorities.

The Group of Ten responded by forming the Environmental Consortium for Minority Outreach to improve minority hiring.

The Reporter surveyed 11 national environmental organizations and found that of their 2,145 board and staff members, 390 or 18.2 percent were minorities. Minorities make up 24.4 percent of the staff at the National Parks and Conservation Association, but just 5.6 percent at the Izaak Walton League.

In Chicago, only Greenpeace and CBE have more than one or two employees. CBE's staff of 18 includes two minorities, both door-to-door canvassers. Greenpeace has one black employee on its full-time staff of 18.

Greenpeace, however, is praised by local community groups for its leadership on minority issues. Since the mid-1980s, the group has fought incinerators in Robbins, Harvey and Northwest Indiana, and has worked with several inner-city groups.

The Illinois Environmental Council, a statewide coalition of groups, has one Chicago staffer, who is white.

Poor Record
In response to criticism that the EPA had a poor track record on minority issues, EPA Administrator William K. Reilly appointed an environmental equity panel in July 1990. Its report, released in February, concluded that the EPA "does not presently give enough explicit priority to issues of environmental equity."

But the report does not address staffing inequities. EPA’s Region V offices employ a staff of 1,274, most in the Chicago office, a spokesman said. While minorities make up 33 percent of the EPA’s staff, they hold 16.4 percent of the professional positions, according to the agency's 1991 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission report. Of the 367 black and Latino employees, 202 hold clerical or data entry jobs. Most of the 97 black and Latino administrative personnel are secretaries and administrative assistants, the spokesman said. ,

The city's new Department of the Environment has 66 employees, but the department refused to give a racial breakdown.

In June 1990, the Reporter found that fly-dumping-illegally dumping tons of garbage from trucks-had surged in predominantly black wards. ("Blacks Hit Hardest by Fly-Dumping Epidemic," June 1990). Thirteen of the 18 city wards with the most illegally-dumped garbage removed by city trucks were at least 70 percent black. Fly-dumping makes neighborhood development even more difficult in already blighted areas.

The latest figures from the Department of Streets and Sanitation show that minority wards are still plagued by the practice. Of the 1 0 city wards with the most illegally-dumped garbage, nine are at least 65 percent minority.

City Department of Environment Commissioner Henry Henderson said he has made enforcement of anti-fly-dumping laws a priority. He said he is seeking police power to shut down illegal dumps. The department is also trying to boost recycling efforts in large apartment buildings and minority communities, he said.

The Chicago City Council Committee on Energy, Environmental Protection and Public Utilities, chaired by Ald. Edwin Eisendrath (43rd), has three white staff members. The committee has seven white, five black and two Hispanic aldermen.

"Anything we can do on lead abatement and anything we can do on toxic cleanup, will affect poorer communities, because they're the ones who have been shafted,' Eisendrath said.

Suburban Split
The battle over the household waste incinerator in south suburban Robbins underscores the split between activists and local officials over environmental dangers and economic development.

In October 1988, village officials hammered out an agreement with the Philadelphia-based Reading Energy Co. to build a waste-to-energy incinerator that would collect garbage from surrounding suburbs to produce fuel.

Robbins residents and activists from neighboring communities formed the South Cook County Environmental Action Coalition in 1990 to fight the proposal.

The current battle is over a suit filed in December 1991 by Illinois Attorney General Roland W. Burris, who has asked the court to reject Reading's permit for the site because the firm did not properly notify residents about the project.

If Reading wins, officials said construction should start by the end of the summer. If Burris wins, Reading will have to reapply for its permit and environmentalists will try to block the project again.

Robbins Mayor Irene H. Brodie said her efforts to bring economic development projects to Robbins date back to 1968, when she invested her own money in a retail development project.

"We couldn't get a McDonald's, we couldn't get a jewel, an A&P or a Walgreens," she said.

Brodie conceded that Robbins must rely on other people's garbage for economic development because the community has run out of alternatives.

Despite the pressure for economic development, minority communities should seriously consider the health effects of environmental hazards, said Eraina B. Dunn, executive director of Harvey's Human Action Community Organization, which has twice defeated plans to build incinerators in the predominantly black south suburb.

"If you are impoverished enough or desperate enough, you buy into these plans without realizing what you are doing to future generations," she said.

Linc Cohen is a Chicago free-lance writer.
Contributing: Paul Caine