For more than 100 years, my family’s business, General Iron Industries, has provided a vital service: We process and recycle the Chicago area’s discarded metal products, including demolition debris, vehicles and kitchen appliances. While the need for our recycling service has grown, our neighborhood along the North Branch of the Chicago River has changed dramatically.
Now, with our planned manufacturing district and industrial neighbors gone, we no longer fit amid the rapidly gentrifying development that will surround us. We get it, and because of that, we have begun the process to transition to a new site that will create and preserve jobs in Chicago.
During our transition, we want to work with, not against, our current and future neighbors to address their concerns, and assure them that our business is utilizing — and continually striving for — the best-in-class environmental controls.
Unfortunately, some have branded us with a scarlet “P” for polluter, and questioned the motives of aldermen who recently defeated an order ostensibly to restrict our hours, but which effectively would have crippled our operations. In the cynical view of such critics, aldermen who acknowledged the necessity of our business and our tenure in the neighborhood were deemed compromised, while the lone alderman who moved to effectively shut us down had only altruistic motives. This conclusion is both wrongheaded and dangerous because it lacks a thoughtful examination of the facts, starting with the record before a City Council committee and the entire council.
It should not be meaningless that the Department of Public Health has inspected our business 40 times in 2018 and has not found a single violation to support a credible claim that we are a public nuisance. Also missing is the Law Department’s assessment that aldermen could run afoul by ordering the health commissioner to revoke our expanded hours without due process, including any documented evidence establishing that our business’ permitted hours created a nuisance.
The fact is that our business provides a vital, albeit gritty, service for the Chicago area. When we process approximately 700,000 tons of obsolete metal products annually, we are removing the equivalent of all the garbage collected in Chicago in a single year. We also serve to keep city sanitation costs from skyrocketing and help prevent heavy metal objects from obstructing streets and alleys. Landfills are simply not a viable alternative.
The most important facts, however, demonstrate our commitment to environmental protection and public health. General Iron is one of only a few metal shredding facilities, and the only one in the Chicago area, that has installed a high-efficiency air filter to control particulate matter and metals emissions. Recent tests supervised by the federal Environmental Protection Agency showed that our particulate matter and metals emissions were far below relevant standards and our particulate matter emissions rate was less than 3 percent of our permitted limits.
Separately, the Chicago health commissioner stated in a letter last spring that it was inaccurate for a neighborhood resident to assert a public health risk based on a pilot academic study, which happened to be scientifically flawed. Further, our recent testing for 17 specific metals, as well as an additional impact assessment that General Iron voluntarily performed, yielded positive results.
Unfortunately, these important facts are being obscured by political malice, flawed methodology, and some environmental violations that we believe were premature and erroneous. Even so, we are working cooperatively with the EPA to resolve any issues. As a step in that process, we are committed to exceeding a state requirement to reduce our volatile organic compound emissions by 81 percent by installing new control equipment. We are preparing to spend approximately $2 million to operate the first metal shredder in Chicago, and one of the first in the country, with a highly effective regenerative thermal oxidizer that will greatly reduce VOC emissions.
In addition, we hope aldermen and city officials support our commitment to preserve jobs in the city for approximately 130 workers whose average income is $80,000 annually.
We accept that recycling the vast quantity of material that we process comes with a heightened level of responsibility to our neighborhood, as well as to our employees, suppliers and the entire city that we have proudly called home for more than a century.
A new site in the city offers an opportunity to rebuild our operation at a location with an expansive buffer and the chance to construct an enclosed, technologically advanced metal shredder. We are looking forward to having the same high standards applied in our new neighborhood.
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