After a summer of poor air quality, Lori Lightfoot seeks to bring environmental justice with new zoning ordinance
2020 gave rise to a novel respiratory pandemic and Chicago’s worst air quality in eight summers, making it a bad year for the lungs of the city’s residents.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot hopes to change that with the introduction of a new zoning ordinance that should improve air quality for the low-income areas residents whom this issue most directly affects. However, activist groups have doubts whether this will fully address the scope of this cloud looming over Chicago.
The zoning ordinance was proposed in late July after an especially bad summer in terms of air quality. It was passed on Sept. 10 and was signed into effect with aldermans in attendance representing the North Lawndale, Little Village, and McKinley Park, and Southeast Side neighborhoods. The ordinance aims to reduce industrialization in these high-risk areas, allowing people to have more input on which factories, industry facilities, and manufacturing plants can enter into their communities.
Low income communities are often the most affected by air pollution, especially in Chicago, a racially segregated industrial freight hub where diesel emissions, in particular, remain a problem, Bloomberg recently reported. In this city, industrial facilities like rail yards, warehouses, manufacturing and sorting plants, and intermodal factories are often concentrated in low-income areas where residents are primarily people of color.
Credit: Chicago Dept. of Public Health) Air quality is an issue that affects certain Chicago neighborhoods much more than others
Under the new ordinance, industrial facilities will undergo a more rigorous review before being allowed to begin working in certain areas, and those already operating in these areas will be subjected to a new review which ensures they are being held to proper environmental standards. This effort will attempt to achieve a balance between growing and revitalizing the economy in these areas with new businesses, while still being environmentally responsible.
Lightfoot cited Reserve Marine Recycle as an example of this - the company has operated in the Southwest Side for 28 years and is now making $8 million in facility upgrades to reduce emissions.
“At its core, this ordinance is about environmental equity and justice," Lightfoot said.
However, some activist groups, such as the Environmental Law and Policy Center (ELPC) and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), have doubts over whether this ordinance will address the issue at the scale they feel is necessary. According to multiple reports by WTTW following new environmental protection laws, Susan Mudd of the ELPC believes many concerns are left unaddressed, specifically for diesel vehicles and emissions, such as those that are currently emitted by CTA buses at alarming levels (despite years of announcements saying the buses would be converted to electric).
The elephant in the room is the absence of any mention of General Iron, the steel manufacturing plant which plans to controversially move operations from the predominately-white Lincoln Park to the lower-income Southeast Side neighborhood, an area already mired with air quality and environmental issues, according to a report by Block Club Chicago. Speakers at a town hall meeting last Saturday called the move an act of “environment and systemic racism,” according to a Chicago Sun-Times report.
Also noticeably absent from the ordinance was the MAT Asphalt plant which opened in McKinley Park in 2018. The facility has been protested by neighborhood activist groups ever since, who say the plant was constructed without prior notice to neighbors and that it places further strain on an already environmentally burdened area. It is unlikely that the plant would have been able to open under the new zoning ordinances, as it operates just a few hundred feet away from residential streets, homes, schools, and sits across the street from the neighborhood’s namesake park (the new ordinance has strict distancing requirements for these kinds of facilities).
Credit:Twitter/@JacksonpCTU) McKinley Park residents protest the MAT Asphalt plant which was constructed in their neighborhood in 2018
The fight around improving air quality has become louder in the past year as COVID-19, a respiratory virus, has renewed concerns for clean air. Multiple studies have shown the link between polluted areas and increased COVID-19 mortality, including a team of Harvard scientists who found that living in an area with increased soot levels for more than 20 years increased fatality in COVID-19 cases by 8 percent. The masks haven’t been doing much against air pollution either, as the particles are small enough to be breathed in through a mask.
What does this mean for Chicago’s air quality issues at large?
Despite our hopes for a silver lining, our efforts to stay at home during the COVID-19 lockdown did little to improve our environmental emissions issued in Chicago. Soot levels in the Chicago area declined by only 1 percent in April compared with the previous year. Compare this to New York City, whose soot levels fell by 28 percent, or Los Angeles at 16 percent, during the shelter-in-place orders.
Mark Potosnak, chair of the Department of Environmental Science & Studies at DePaul University, has an interesting hypothesis about why Chicago did not enjoy the same environmental benefits of the COVID-19 shutdown as other major cities.
“While a lot of commuter traffic did go down, Chicago is a regional transportation hub for both trucks and trains,” said Potosnak. “Just because of our geography, we really are the gateway to the West, so diesel emissions stayed mostly consistent over the shutdown as commercial goods were still moved across the country.”
Potosnak is currently researching this topic, and although the research is not completed, the data is showing support for this hypothesis so far. One example he gave is that Northbrook and other northern suburbs actually did see slight improvement in air quality during the shutdown, but the Midway area and Southwest Side saw less or no improvement, as they are located closer to these transportation and industrial corridors.
While Los Angeles is notorious for its poor air quality, Chicago’s was actually worse during this summer due to unusually hot Midwestern weather baking auto exhaust into ground-level ozone chemicals, also known as smog.
This summer was especially bad for a bevy of reasons, such as the increase in fireworks usage over the summer, which release chemicals that don’t dissipate if the air is not properly circulating (if you or your loved ones had trouble breathing over Fourth of July weekend, this could be why!). Lake Michigan and the wind often play a role, too, as smog-forming pollutants called “pre-cursors” form over the water and are brought onto land via the wind. Potosnak also cited the unusually warm weather, as high air climate and poor air quality are historically correlated.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) warned that the first nine days of July this summer were “unhealthy for sensitive groups” encouraging children, the elderly, and adults with lung or heart disease to limit their outdoor activity. As you may be able to imagine, this was likely not fully adhered to over the holiday weekend.
But on a larger scale, beyond just Chicago, air quality is worsening overall as climate change triggers extreme weather, one tenet of which is dirty air. As climate change worsens, its effects are exacerbated by the lack of response in terms of federal regulations. One of President Donald Trump’s biggest action items of the past year was weakening around 100 environmental and clean air regulations, and under his leadership the EPA has ignored new research that shows smog is more toxic to humans than previously believed, according to multiple reports.
Did you notice the sky looking hazy - or even milky - a few weeks back? NBC Chicago reported in mid-September, wildfires on the west coast caused a massive plume of smoke which was pulled eastward by the wind. Despite the menacing appearance, and the fact that the wildfires caused some of the worst air quality in the world in Seattle, Portland and San Francisco, the plume over Chicago was high enough to not cause any significant affect to our breathing air.
If current trends in Chicago continue, we will almost certainly fall into a new category of the Clean Air Act which will require more strict regulations of industrial emissions. But in the meantime, Potosnak encourages us to take the little steps we can to improve the environment around us, saying that “everything adds up, so the little things matter.” And for those motivated to change environmental policy in our city, “if you’re asking for large scale, systematic changes, you also need to make those personal lifestyle changes as well.”