Saturday was the first time I took
a tour with The Southeast Environmental Task Force. We rode a coach bus from
the Chicago Cultural Center at 10am to check out the Energy and Industrial
Areas in Chicago’s South Side. Making our way through Pilsen we stopped at a
coal fired power plant and from there went to the Testa Produce facilities in
the Stockyards. Personally I’d much rather see the giant wind turbine Testa
owns spinning on a summer day then have to breathe in what comes out of those
smokestacks, as most of those residents of the area have to do on a daily
basis.
We moved on to West Pullman to City
Solar, it’s the largest urban solar power generating facility in the country.
The cool thing about the site is that it makes use of former Industrial
property deemed that has been polluted. They call these lands ‘brownfields’ and
developers are required to remediate these properties based on what they plan
on reusing them.
The rest of the tour focused on the
Calumet Region. Waste Management has a methane turbine generating electricity
that a representative gave us a tour of. As you can probably guess the gas is a
by-product of the rotting contents of their landfill. Dumps used to burn it off
into the air with no benefit at all. Inside it looked like a jet engine housed
in a very smelly garage. The site is closed to new dumping but the company is
fighting to change that. SETF and other groups are already opposing that in
their community.
Lunch was great; they sat us all
down at La Hacienda restaurant in the Slag Valley neighborhood. We got to talk,
network, and exchange quick little life stories. It’s a social as well as
educational tour. I met people who owned their own green business, politicians,
and students. So much is packed into this four-hour tour. Our guide Tom is a board member of SETF. He’s
funny and pretty knowledgeable on the neighborhoods and history of the region
too. Crossing the border into Indiana, the tour included the BP refinery as
part of the story of where our energy comes from. We drove through the
Southeast Side which is dotted with brownfields from old steel industry, coal
stockpiles, and abandoned grain silos. The community is zoned for heavy
industry so they are trying to balance the need for employment, energy demands,
and quality of the environment-- all things for a balanced and healthy life.
This tour gave me a snapshot of life in these neighborhoods as well the variety
of energy technologies.
Tom Shepherd starts the group off with basic information about SETF
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Testa Produce is LEED Platinum Certified |
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| Rows and Rows of Solar Panels |
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| Tom shares facts about the Solar Farm. |
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| Tour group inside Waste Management's landfill gas to electricity facility. |
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Waste Management's Methane to Electric Generator   Future site of the proposed Leucadia coal gasification platn. A stack from the coke ovens still stands.  Tom points out all the industries located on the River and how they impact the environment. |
