ENVIRONMENT
The Smell Behind the School Industrial emissions have Little Village students and organizers worried BY ELENA BRUESS
J
azmin Sierra noticed the smell first. A sickly sweet, kind of plasticky odor that settled thick in the air. The sixteen-year-old had been away the whole summer, so when the fall semester started at Little Village Lawndale High School, the experience was overwhelming. It was an odor that Sierra knew all too well, a smell that often wafted from the nearby factory—a manufacturer of paint-coated containers. After a few days back, she became resigned to it again. “I don't really differentiate the smell, unless it's a very, very strong smell, where I'm like ‘Oh my god, what is that?’” Sierra says. “I've been living [in Little Village] my whole life so I'm really used to it. It's been going on for a long time.” Sierra is sitting in a circle of desks with several other students. Every Tuesday afternoon, the Environmental Justice Club meets in an empty science classroom on the second floor of Little Village Lawndale High School. The meetings are hosted by the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO). On this afternoon in February, Karen Canales Salas, the education coordinator at LVEJO, calls the group to attention and begins assigning duties to the students for the coming weeks. “Sylvia, can you take care of the flyers?” The Environmental Justice Club formed the year prior as a way for students to work on the new school garden and get involved with local environmental issues, of which there is no shortage. The high school sits smack in the middle of a Chicago industrial corridor. The remains of the Crawford coal plant, shut down in 2012, are 16 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
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currently being demolished half a mile away. Other active factories loom nearby. The smokestacks from the one that produces the smell—BWAY Corporation— puff out clouds of emissions directly behind the high school. Ash Martinez, an EJ Club member since its start, spoke up. “I don't live here in the community so coming here to school and breathing this kind of air, it does make your eyes open up, like ‘Oh yeah there's something going on here.’” The group nods in agreement. Sometimes the smell is so strong, it makes them ill. “I get migraines when I come to school,” Sylvia Meraz says, clearing her throat and speaking seriously. “I feel so physically sick sometimes.” Just under two decades ago, Chicago Public Schools promised to build a new high school to ease urgent overcrowding in the local schools. But the plans were put on a seemingly endless monetary hold. On Mother’s Day 2001, fourteen Little Village residents staged a hunger strike demanding the school be built. Their calls for change were finally met after nineteen days. Once the school was funded, there was a search for a spot big enough for the building. The only available location was surrounded by industry. "Little Village's land use is forty percent for industrial use," said Nancy Meza, a community organizer at LVEJO. At their main offices in Little Village, there is a stack of papers in front of her, a template for a community brochure about BWAY’s pollution to the side. Meza has been working on this issue for a while. "Because there isn't a lot of space available here [in Little Village] for park space, for institutions, they decided that the
high school would be placed in the industrial corridor,” she continued. The school finally opened its doors at the corner of Kostner Avenue and 31st Street in 2005. “People were really excited,” said Meza. “I don’t think there had been much thought of the consequence it would have.” Activists campaigns like this one were not new to the community. The neighborhood has long focused on struggles for justice. For years LVEJO and the other residents had pushed for the closing of the Crawford plant right in the heart of the community, and another just five miles away in Pilsen. According to the City of Chicago, some, if not most, of Little Village properties are within 400 feet of a truck route, and a 2018 review by the Department of Planning and Development found that 24.7 percent of businesses in Little Village are industrial, with 21.9 percent in transportation— primarily freight trucks.
Students from the high school not only breathe in the fumes from industry, but dodge semi trucks speeding past the school. Truck traffic is expected to get much heavier as a massive warehousing facility is slated for construction on the site of the old coal plant, with a Target warehouse announced as its anchor tenant. The demolition of the plant began in April with the controversial collapse of its 100-year-old smokestack, which released a thick plume of potentially toxic dust across the neighborhood, causing its own set of pollution concerns. Locals also fear that three blocks away from the high school, at Zapata Elementary Academy, the expansion of the Unilever mayonnaise factory will put younger children at risk and cause even more truck traffic in the community. A study conducted by LVEJO found that 1.3 diesel trucks pass Little Village Lawndale High School every minute. Some of those are headed for BWAY. But in the case of this company, the harsh smell is an even bigger concern to residents than the traffic. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), there are 8,067 households and 10,190 children under the age of seventeen within a one mile radius of the plant. And BWAY—recently absorbed by Mauser Packaging Solutions—has often caught the eyes of the EPA. PHOTO BY ELENA BRUESS
