Cheap Seats 2022 By Rich Trzupek

The Dangers of Fresh Fruit and Recycling

By Rich Trzupek
  Going on 40-plus years dealing with environmental regulations in general and air quality management in particular. What an odd career. Not one that I would have chosen, but also not one that I regret. Working for and enamored of the industrial sector and the men and women who power it, I have a different and, in my opinion, usually more accurate point of view from many in the media or serving in office.
  Let’s hop into the Wayback Machine, a device that the vast majority of modern journalists and elected officials don’t even know exists.
  When the original Clean Air Act made it though Congress for then President Nixon’s signature in 1970, American air quality was far, far worse than it is today. The Clean Air Act changed that. Many thousands of industrial sources that had heretofore been uncontrolled were required to install controls. Millions of mobile and area sources that had flown under the radar, became matters of attention and, as time went on, more regulation.
  The original Clean Air Act was more or less a bi-partisan effort. Nixon and his party encouraged its development, though those committed to demonizing the GOP then and now work very, very hard to paint an alternate picture of history.
  The original Clean Air Act was a balancing act. On the one hand, Congress recognized that it would be unwise to strangle the nation’s economy in pursuit of environmental purity. On the other hand, Congress realized that it needed to provide a path toward healthy progress, less the increasingly rapid expansion of technology lead to unforeseen consequences.
  So a system was put in place that set down certain air quality goals and provided the states with delegated authority to design and administer programs to meet those goals. That system has been spectacularly successful. There is no better measure of its success by the fact that as we meet one air quality goal, the EPA inevitably raises the bar. The ozone (aka: smog) National Ambient Air Quality Standard has been reduced on three separate occasions for example.
  One of the foundations of the Clean Air Act is the permit system, which is almost exclusively administered by states and local air districts, as part of State Implementation Plans (SIPs) approved by the USEPA.
  In Chicago, Southside Recycling (the former General Iron) applied for and received authority to construct and begin operation of a state-of-the-art metals recycling facility. The delegated authority, Illinois EPA, issued the permit after thorough review. The plant was built in the Hegewisch neighborhood, which is also the historical home of the Trzupek clan.
  This should have been a good thing. My old neighborhood is rather poor these days, so any new industry that brings jobs with it is a good thing. The environmental impact of the plant is trivial. I can bore you with numbers galore, but when one compares the amount of any air pollutant that Southside Recycling would emit to the amount of existing air pollution that is generated by thousands of industrial sources, millions of mobile sources and God-only-knows how many natural sources, the plant is barely a blip on the radar.
  The environmental benefits on the other hand are huge. Every ton of steel we recycle is one ton less that we have to refine from iron ore, a far, far dirtier process.
  Last Friday the City of Chicago told Southside they can’t operate their plant, because the city is denying them a city operating permit under an ordinance that didn’t exist when Southside built the plant. Whether or not the city has the legal authority to do so remains to be seen.
  It is clear that the cowards who run the city are simply caving in to uniformed hysteria, undermining the foundations of the most successful environmental protection legislation in history. They should be ashamed of themselves, but its hard to be ashamed when you are cowering in fear.
  Email: richtrzupek@gmail.com