It is before 8 a.m. and already a continuous stream of trucks filters into Sims Metal Management at 2500 S Paulina Street in Pilsen. They carry dilapidated cars, discarded appliances and scrap to Chicago’s largest metal recycler.
On this morning, June 3, the racket of trucks and heavy machinery is met with a rallying cry from a small crowd that has gathered at the facility’s gates.
“What do we want? Clean air! When do we want it? Now!”
As they chant, protesters carry signs that identify toxic metals—including lead, mercury and manganese—which they fear are pouring out of Sims and into their community.
For the last decade, the Pilsen metal recycler has faced a steady drum of public outcry after regulators identified harmful particulate matter escaping the facility. After a decade-long permitting process that has required Sims to improve its emissions controls, the company awaits the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency’s (IEPA) final decision on whether to approve its operating permit.
“The air has no boundaries,” said Myrna Salgado-Romo, a McKinley Park resident who joined the Pilsen Environmental Rights and Reform Organization (PERRO) at the June 3 event. “[Emissions are] dissolving into our water on the canal. It’s affecting the plants, the nature in our area.”
While recent tests at Sims meet IEPA requirements, PERRO and other environmental activists are raising concerns that data do not show decreases in a number of toxic metals coming out of the facility. They are calling on Governor Pritzker to halt Sims’s operations until the company can provide more data to confirm they are not a public health threat.
A public health threat
When not properly controlled, metal-laden particulate matter from metal shredders can become airborne, spilling into neighboring communities. Exposure to these metals has been linked to increased cancer risk, neurodevelopmental issues, and impacts on cardiovascular health and lung function.
As the EPA has increasingly scrutinized metal recyclers for their public health impact, Sims has been a frequent offender of environmental regulations.
After EPA inspectors first identified issues with emissions controls at the Pilsen shredder, Sims was fined $225,000 in 2019 and entered into a consent order requiring it to secure a Federally Enforceable State Operating Permit.
Testing conducted as part of the permitting process identified further emissions control issues, leading to a lawsuit from Attorney General Kwame Raoul in 2021 that mandated the company install improved equipment.
Representatives from Sims maintain that their Chicago facility poses no public health concerns, citing data from more recent testing.
In a statement provided to The Chicago Reporter, Michael Trupin, Director of Air and Environmental Permitting & Compliance Programs at Sims Metal, quoted EPA monitoring data stating that current emissions from Sims “would not cause either short- or long-term health effects for the community near the facility.”
No data, no permit
Donald Wink, a University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) chemistry professor, acknowledged that Sims’ most recent air monitoring results are in compliance with EPA requirements. He told TCR, however, that he believes those thresholds are too permissive.
“To a certain extent, the argument the community has here is not with Sims,” he said. “It’s with the people who are policing Sims and saying Sims can get away with this, because it’s not above what they think is a problem.”
Among Wink’s greatest concerns are lead—which research has widely shown presents no safe level of human exposure—and manganese.The minimal risk level for manganese, set by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, was based on a single study from 1992.
In the three decades since, researchers have identified manganese as a neurotoxin and correlated it to worse outcomes for asthma. A 2021 Chicago-area study, for example, found decreased lung function in children with asthma who were exposed to manganese.
Ajay Chatha, an organizer with PERRO, finds it concerning that IEPA’s regulatory thresholds do not reflect this research. “The way they’re using ‘safe’ is a regulatory legal definition of what safe is,” he said. “What we’re saying is that just does not match up to scientific literature as of 10 years ago.”
Wink is also concerned over the quality of emissions data coming from the Sims facility.
A critical component of Sims’s permit application are the results of a procedure called a stack test, which measures the emissions coming out of the shredder. According to Wink, the IEPA had stated that 17 metals would be evaluated as part of the test.
In reviewing the results, Wink found that only 10 were actually tested. Of these, just three showed decreases compared to data from 2019, while the other seven showed increases.
Manganese was among the metals absent from the report.
Chatha is critical of the IEPA for moving forward with its permit review without requiring Sims to complete the scope of testing it had promised. “That just gestures to the fact that the work that we’re doing, this public health environmental work, we have to do it because our regulatory bodies are just not doing what they say that they do,” he said.
The absent oversight of CDPH
McKinley Park resident Anthony Moser can smell the stench of asphalt from a nearby concrete plant before even getting out of bed in the morning. Looking deeper into environmental enforcement, he reviewed 20 years of records from the Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH) and identified concerning trends.
Moser found that pollution complaints rarely led to citations. When violations were issued, they amounted to slap-on-the-wrist settlements that underutilized CDPH’s enforcement capabilities.
Sims fits squarely within these trends. Under CPDH, the Pilsen site has the third highest amount of air pollution complaints of any facility in Chicago, according to city data.
These complaints allege of “huge smoke” coming from the shredder, creating terrible odors and breathing difficulties. While 36 notices of violation have been issued against Sims since 2012, it was only found liable twice.
Thirty notices, all issued in 2020, were settled for $18,000 without Sims admitting liability. According to TCR analysis, these fines could have totaled roughly $130,000 to $260,000 if Sims had been deemed liable.
“I think the city has significant unused powers,” said Moser, noting that instead of fines CDPH could issue abatement orders to pause or limit operations at a facility while it is polluting.
“It was clear from the exercise of powers in the early stages of the pandemic that when a public health threat is perceived the city can choose to take action that shuts down businesses,” he said. “What that means, I think, is they don’t consider the air pollution from these facilities to be a meaningful public health threat.”
Instead, CDPH has supported Sims’s continued operation, making the controversial decision to renew its city operating permit in 2024, which was three years overdue at the time.
Residents say the move sent a clear message about the priorities of city leadership.
“You end up getting backhanded with the city saying, ‘okay, we’re giving them this permit,’ said Theresa McNamara of the Southwest Environmental Alliance. “And we, the people living in the community, get screwed.”
Not in our neighborhood
CDPH has, at times, taken a stricter stance against polluters. When another large metal recycler announced interest in moving from the North Side to the Southeast Side in 2018, residents came out in droves to decry what they saw as a clear act of environmental racism.
Operated by General Iron, the facility had been a chronic polluter and the subject of numerous citations for toxic emissions at its Lincoln Park site. While the former Rahm Emanuel and Lori Lightfoot administrations worked with the company to relocate to the already pollution-burdened Southeast Side, residents countered with a civil rights lawsuit, demonstrations, public health panels and a widely-publicized hunger strike.
CDPH ultimately denied the metal recycler its permit to operate at the new location in 2022, stating in an official release that the facility would pose an “unacceptable risk” to a community with existing health vulnerabilities.
Óscar Sanchez, now co-executive director of the Southeast Environmental Task Force, was one of several activists who spent a month on hunger strike against General Iron. He says that he has talked with organizers at PERRO about Sims, sharing tactics that led to their unlikely victory.
Still, he acknowledged that timing was a key factor in the campaign against General Iron, coming when the pandemic and Black Lives Matter movement had galvanized public action.
“We call it the perfect storm,” Sanchez said. “These environmental injustices have been happening for years, for decades. That timing, it was just like things were moving because people were so exhausted.”
The future of environmental regulation in Chicago
This May, the Department of Environment was revived, reclaiming regulatory authority over polluters from CDPH.
Alderman Byron Sigcho-Lopez of the 25th Ward—where Sims is located—believes this could empower the city to take the lead in setting a better precedent for regulating pollution statewide.
“It is my hope that the state takes this opportunity to work with the Department of Environment to have consistent frameworks, state and city level that can help us hold industry accountable,” Sigcho-Lopez told TCR.
Sigcho-Lopez pointed to recent initiatives in Chicago, like the installation of a city-wide air monitoring network and the pending Hazel Johnson Cumulative Impacts Ordinance, as tools that can be leveraged by the new Department of Environment to better protect historically burdened communities.
Others, like Moser, are skeptical that the transition will lead to better enforcement.
“Functionally what they did was take the same people who were doing that work and just put them under a different department,” he said.
This includes Dave Graham, who was identified as a key figure responsible for the botched demolition of Crawford Power Plant in 2021 that left Little Village covered in dust. Graham will maintain his position as director of environmental health and safety compliance within the new department. “I don’t think a lot has changed in a practical way yet,” Moser concluded.
The IEPA will open a two week period for public comment on Sims’s permit approval. They have yet to announce when this will occur.
