Does the Northwest Incinerator really put 17 pounds of lead into the air every hour? That would be 150,000 pounds a year, and it would make the incinerator the largest lead polluter in Cook County by a factor of about 100. (The next largest–a recycler of nonferrous metals–gives out about 1,500 pounds a year.) Members of the anti-incinerator coalition WASTE say it does; William Abolt and Henry Henderson of the city’s Department of Environment say the claim is no longer true and WASTE knows it.
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There’s no question that it was true in the spring of 1993. That’s when a city-employed, EPA-supervised testing company measured lead emissions from one boiler at 5.7 pounds per hour, roughly 7 percent of the total 80 pounds of particulates being emitted from that boiler in the same time.
This is not one reduction, but two. The incinerator is giving off fewer particulates and therefore less lead in the 1994 test. And its particulates this time contain a ten times smaller proportion of lead than they did in 1993. Abolt takes credit for the first drop, but not the second. If lead dropped from 7 percent of emissions in 1993 to 0.8 percent in 1994, he thinks that must just reflect a change in the makeup of the garbage burned on that particular day. So, according to the city, on a “good garbage” day, each boiler is supposedly giving off less than one ounce an hour; on a “bad garbage” day, it might be half a pound.
