Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s top public health official determined that a car-shredding operation will not open on the Southeast Side, ending an almost three-year battle between her administration and residents who said they can’t tolerate any more air pollution.
Southside Recycling, the renamed, relocated business formerly known as General Iron, was expecting to open about a year ago under an agreement with the city. Community organizers fought back, saying that the industrial Southeast Side already suffers from very poor air quality. The fact that the business was being moved from white, affluent Lincoln Park to a working-class Latino neighborhood surrounded by Black communities is racist, residents said. That claim drew a federal civil rights investigation that is ongoing.
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