There’s no nice way to say it. A growing number of Chicagoans believe that the city government is using their tax dollars to poison them–by burning their garbage. The Chicago Northwest Waste-to-Energy Facility, at 740 N. Kilbourn near Chicago and Cicero, is a “death machine,” according to Cook County Commissioner Danny Davis. A “monster,” says Lillian Drummond of the South Austin Coalition Community Council. The Center for Neighborhood Technology, in an October report, merely calls it dirty, expensive, and superfluous.
Last summer’s tests also measured lead emissions again, but using a different method (see sidebar for details). The results imply that the incinerator is now putting only 1,333 to 19,500 pounds of lead into the air annually. The exact amount depends on how many boilers are running, and how much ink and plastic and solder and old paint are in the residential garbage the incinerator burns.
For one thing, it’s not the Daley administration against the independents: 28th Ward alderman Ed Smith, no Daley clone, says he’s confident that a rebuilt incinerator “will cause no harm to the community.” It’s in his ward. “I have more alarm about the hundreds of thousands of people who are cigarette smokers than I do for this facility that will be run by people who know what they’re doing.”
But in 1971, God was doing the burning. When it was built under Mayor Daley the Elder, the incinerator stood for forward-thinking environmentalism. The city’s old incinerators–at Fullerton and Ashland (Lincoln Park), 103rd and Doty (southeast side), and 34th and Lawndale (southwest side)–could not meet the standards of the 1967 Air Quality Act, and were all shut down during the 1970s. (Chicago burned a million tons of garbage in 1972; nowadays it burns around 400,000 tons, roughly a third of what the city’s garbage trucks pick up.)
From outside the fence, the evidence is at best circumstantial:
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
“We lived in Logan Square,” says Jim Slama, publisher of Conscious Choice, a bimonthly “Journal of Ecology & Natural Living.” “Every time the wind blew out of the southwest [from the direction of the incinerator about three miles away] my wife got violently ill. That’s when I really started getting mad.” Still mad, he says Henry Henderson should be fired “and replaced by a real environmentalist.”
The incinerator is a likelier culprit in the case of lead poisoning. Small amounts of lead (above 9 micrograms per deciliter) can cause learning problems and attention deficit disorder in children; in very high doses, lead can cause convulsions and death. Elevated lead levels are widespread in the blood of children living in Austin, West Garfield Park, Humboldt Park, and West Town. But so are old houses with peeling lead-based paint, the most common way small children ingest the metal. Could incinerator emissions be at fault too?
