Air, soil and water pollution
Metal recycling facilities around the country have a history of contaminating the air, water and soil in and around their facilities. For a snapshot to the scale of the problem, we encourage you to take a look at the following links that discuss a study recently conducted by the City of Houston Texas.
Similar investigations have revealed serious problems in California as well…
Fires and explosions: Fires and explosions are a major, consistent and common problem at metal recycling facilities. A quick Google search will reveal dozens of recent examples from around the country. We encourage you to listen to this brief phone interview with Darren Snyder who dealt with this problem in Elkhart Indiana were the community had to fight for years to shut down a dangerous metal shredding operation in their town.
https://archive.org/details/DarrenElkHartMetalShredderEdited
You can also check out this article and video from a community in Oklahoma who has also had constant problems with explosions…
We were able to find references to over a dozen examples of fires and explosions in just the last year alone. We also encourage you to look at this report from a company that ensures metal recyclers as it emphasizes the scale of this problem in the industry. Note in the report were it states… “As we have seen, scrap metal facilities have many fire hazards…In the last three years, at least 23 fires and explosions have occurred at scrap metal facilities in California alone. Newspaper reports about fires at scrap metal facilities seem to occur weekly.” Keep in mind this is a pro-industry source…
http://media.genre.com/documents/FacMatters201302-en.pdf
The metal recycling industry is considered the fourth deadliest industry in America as explained in the following article on a pro-metal recycling industry website. Note the sentence in the article that states… “While all industrial processes involve risk, few operations are more potentially hazardous than metal recycling. It involves both sharp and heavy objects being loaded and unloaded and heavy equipment, shearing, torching, breaking, chopping, crushing, compacting, bailing and shredding.” Again, this is a pro-industry source that is describing the scale of the danger represented by this industry…
http://www.pkmetals.com/metal-recycling-safety-found-lacking/
The increased truck traffic associated with this facility will seriously congest nearby intersections like the one at Cermak, Blue Island and Ashland and will add to the already high level of diesel engine fumes into the neighborhood’s air. Note the above article on the PKMetals website ironically includes a link to a YouTube video that provides a sense of the scale of truck traffic that is likely.
Pure Metal Recycling has attempted to distance themselves from Acme Refining, but we all know that those behind this effort are all directly connected to Acme which has serious pollution, safety, financial and legal problems with their existing facilities in the Bridgeport Community. How can we trust a company whose current operations have serious problems?