Air Pollution Crisis Exposes More Environmental Racism in Illinois

This story originally appeared in The Intercept.

Wendy Abrams has used her wealth to help protect the environment and public health. She’s the founder of a public art exhibit meant to raise awareness on climate change, and she serves on the boards of NRDC Action Fund and the Waterkeeper Alliance, and has been on the Environmental Defense Fund’s National Council. She helped found the Abrams Environmental Law Clinic at the University of Chicago, which trains students to address environmental injustices. Abrams was a major donor to Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Rahm Emanuel, and she has railed against the Keystone Pipeline and air-polluting coal plants.

Abrams’s wealth comes from Medline, a company her great-grandfather founded in 1910. Today Medline is the largest privately held manufacturer and supplier of medical supplies in the United States, with over $10 billion in sales in 2018. Abrams is a principal shareholder in Medline and formerly served as the company’s director of corporate communications; her brothers and husband are now, respectively, Medline’s CEO, president, and chief operating officer.

But now, in an uncomfortable turn of events, Abrams finds herself on the other side of an environmental crisis — affiliated with the polluter, rather than fighting on behalf of the polluted.

The Clear Killer

In 2016, a division of the Environmental Protection Agency found that the air pollutant ethylene oxide, or EtO, was more dangerous than previously thought. The clear gas was already known to cause tumors of the brain, lung, breast, uterus, and lymph system as well as neurological effects, respiratory effects, and numbness of the extremities. But the report changed EtO’s classification from probable human carcinogen to officially “carcinogenic to humans” and found that cancer risk from EtO exposure was 30 times worse than previous estimates.

Because the EPA has yet to set limits on the chemical that reflect this latest science, more than 100 census tracts around the country have elevated cancer risks due in part to ethylene oxide pollution. A 2018 EPA report, which was based on industrial facilities’ tally of their own emissions, clearly tied specific sites emitting the chemical to the cancer risk in each place. And in Waukegan, Illinois, a small city about halfway between Chicago and Milwaukee, the biggest source of ethylene oxide pollution is a Medline plant owned and operated by Wendy Abrams’s family.

Diana Burdette and her husband moved to Waukegan from Chicago in 2010. The former industrial hub on the shores of Lake Michigan offered affordable housing and proximity to the college and graduate schools they were attending. Even while both were in school, Burdette and her husband were able to rent a charming two-bedroom, brick duplex near a wooded area. Though they didn’t know it at the time, the home where they would live for nine years and have two children was being inundated with ethylene oxide from Medline, which was just one mile away, and from another factory three miles away run by a company called Vantage Specialty Chemicals.

Not long after moving to Waukegan, both Burdette and her husband began to develop respiratory problems. Burdette also began to have difficulty digesting food and lost 80 pounds. She also began to get a tingly numbness in her face and fingertips that would come and go but stayed during most of her winters there. Both her children, now three and five, also had breathing difficulties. When they got colds, the entire family relied on nebulizers. And her older son developed severe eczema.

“They kept saying it would clear up, but it never did,” said Burdette. “Until we moved.”

Shortly after the family moved to another home several miles further from the Medline plant last October, her son’s rash finally went away. Burdette’s digestion problems also disappeared, and the numbness in her face and fingertips went away, as did her entire family’s respiratory problems.

The next month, Burdette learned from an article in the Chicago Tribune that the Medline plant had been emitting dangerous amounts of ethylene oxide — the same air pollutant that was also plaguing a community about an hour south in Willowbrook, Illinois. In 2017, the Medline facility released 2,863 pounds of the chemical into the air and the Vantage Specialty Chemicals in nearby Gurnee plant released 2,160 pounds of the chemical, according to reports the companies filed with the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency. Together, the emissions caused the census tract where Burdette and her family lived to have a cancer risk of 157 per million in 2014, according to the most recent EPA air toxics report. That’s about 5 times the national average.

Like the residents of Willowbrook, who formed a community group called Stop Sterigenics to fight the pollution emitted from the nearby Sterigenics plant, people living close to the Medline and Vantage plants, both of which are in Lake County, sprang into action. Burdette began working with Clean Power Lake County, an organization that was already focusing on some of Waukegan’s other serious environmental problems, including a local coal-fired power plant, a coal ash pond, several Superfund sites, and a number of chemical facilities (one of which was the site of a deadly explosion this past weekend). Other residents created a new group, Stop EtO Lake County.

But the environmental activists in the two suburban areas of Chicago have met with different responses. In Willowbrook, where the census tract most affected by ethylene oxide is 77 percent white and has an average per capita income of more than $71,000 a year, the EPA sent high-level officials last August to explain the risk locals faced from the chemical as soon as the federal report identifying it was made public. On the same day, the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, or ATSDR, also released a report the EPA had requested about ethylene oxide in Willowbrook. In November, the EPA began monitoring the air there. And by February, the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency closed the plant. The governor sent out a tweet celebrating the closure and committing to protect “the health and well-being of every Illinoisan.”

But in Waukegan, where the census tract most affected by the chemical is only 25 percent white and has a per capita income of just over $14,000, the same dangerous chemical is still in the air. Although the EPA and the state have known about the ethylene oxide in Lake County and other hotspots around the country since at least August, Burdette and the others residents learned of its presence in their air from the newspaper six months after Willowbrook residents were briefed about it. No high-level officials came to Waukegan or Gurnee to address the local risk.

And while Sterigenics was stopped from releasing ethylene oxide in Willowbrook, the Medline plant in Waukegan and the Vantage facility in Gurnee continue to emit the chemical. So far, the EPA has not done any air monitoring for ethylene oxide near either plant. Meanwhile, the federal agency has continued collecting air samples in Willowbrook even after that plant closed in February.

Lake County’s health department recently announced that it will hire a company to begin monitoring for ethylene oxide near both plants in June. While they welcome the move, local environmental groups have pointed out that the decision leaves their already strapped local governments to shoulder an expense that the federal government has paid for elsewhere. The county and the Illinois Congressional delegation have also requestedthat the ATSDR do an assessment of the health risk presented by ethylene oxide in Lake County, as it did in Willowbrook.

Asked about the discrepancy in its treatment of the two cases of pollution, the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency provided a written response that noted that since the release by U.S. EPA of the monitoring data for Willowbrook, “the Illinois EPA has been evaluating other sources of emissions including those in Lake County.” The statement also said that the state agency has been working with both the Medline and Vantage facilities on measures to reduce emissions and that, in the coming weeks, “Illinois EPA will invite the public to participate in a meeting to discuss these noted and other measures at the source. Vantage will also begin air monitoring in the Gurnee community this quarter. Also in the coming weeks, the Illinois EPA will invite the public to participate in a meeting to discuss a draft construction permit that will detail emissions reducing measures that Medline will undertake very soon.”

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency also provided a written statement in response to questions for this story. While the federal environmental agency acknowledged that it was not conducting air monitoring in Lake County, it said that, along with the IEPA, it is “coordinating with the facilities in Lake County, Illinois, to achieve additional emission reductions. The Agencies are also using a variety of tools, such as air dispersion modeling, to better characterize potential risks near the Lake County facilities, as well as other facilities and areas that NATA, which is EPA’s screening tool, identified as potentially having elevated risks.” The U.S. EPA is also providing technical assistance to the Lake County Health Department on the monitoring it is planning to do, according to the statement.

In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for Vantage said that the company has installed an additional scrubber to reduce emissions and is currently doing testing to verify that it’s functioning properly. Vantage then plans to conduct ambient air monitoring.

The lag in the federal and state response to their problem has left some Lake County residents feeling like second-class citizens. “We want what Willowbrook got,” Jolanta Pomiotlo, a Gurnee resident of 18 years and founding member of Stop EtO in Lake County, told me recently. “We’re being told by our government agencies that all of the resources are being dedicated to Sterigenics, and they can’t afford to pay for testing in Lake County. Apparently only wealthy communities are entitled to resources from the state.”

Members of Clean Power Lake County have also been calling attention to the racial inequity in the state. “They take care of the white communities,” said Burdette, a first generation Guatemalan American. “But what about our black and brown communities? What about us?”