By Ben Joravsky
The fight that united residents of different races and incomes and on both sides of the city’s southern border was the result of a proposal unveiled in 1990. According to its original operators, the Reading Energy Company of Philadelphia, the incinerator would divert tons of garbage from overflowing landfills, generate energy by burning waste, create well-paid jobs, and deliver tax revenues to cash-starved Robbins.
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Reading (and later Foster Wheeler) also repeatedly brought out scientists and engineers to testify that the incinerator would be a state-of-the-art facility and would pose no threat to residents’ health or the environment. “Don’t take our garbage to Michigan. Don’t take our garbage downstate,” boomed state senator William Shaw at one early meeting, where supporters wore big yellow YIMBY (“Yes in My Backyard”) buttons. “Keep it right here in Robbins.”
Opposition was also strong in Mount Greenwood and Beverly, two relatively upscale and predominantly white communities on the city’s far south side. “No one around here wanted it,” says Tangel, a trader at the Chicago Board Options Exchange. “All you have to do is think about those prevailing winds coming out of the southwest and bringing in God only knows what kinds of pollution.”
Within a few years of the law’s passage almost two dozen incinerators had been proposed throughout Illinois, all intended to take advantage of the subsidy. “We had more incinerators than any other state,” says Tangel. “And why not? The taxpayers were paying for them. I figured, ‘Oh, this is easy. We’ll win. What legislator in his right mind’s going to vote for a huge subsidy for waste incinerators, which no community wants anyway?’ Well, guess what? The whole world was upside-down–nothing went the way you’d expect. You’d think our closest allies would be the legislators closest to Robbins. But no. Shaw was strongly in favor of the incinerator, as were most of his fellow members of the legislative black caucus. We’d tell them, ‘It could endanger the health of black people.’ And they’d say, ‘We need the jobs.’ And we’d say, ‘But it’s only going to create a few jobs.’”
Meanwhile resentment in Robbins is growing against the incinerator, which has created only 80 jobs (it’s not clear how many of them are held by Robbins residents). In addition, the EPA recently alleged that the incinerator had violated air-pollution rules 779 times in the six months of 1997 that it was running. “The majority of the violations were failing to operate the burner at the temperatures necessary to prevent the release of toxic pollutants such as dioxin, furans, and mercury,” Carmody wrote in an April 9 story on the EPA allegations. “If the burner temperature drops too low, for example, certain chemicals aren’t destroyed.”
