Incinerator Proves to Be a Pot of Sludge at End of the Rainbow

The first meeting was nearly a decade ago, but Barry Neal remembers it vividly. When you are in the business of burning garbage--by the ton, no less--it is not every day that a town rolls out the red carpet.

The mayor of this Chicago suburb summoned Neal to ask if the Pennsylvania company he worked for would consider building a mammoth garbage burner here. In return for cash, jobs and a few college scholarships, this desperately poor, all-black town of 7,000 people was more than willing to provide a home for a new incinerator. In fact, Robbins courted it. And when environmentalists and other nearby suburbs argued that the burner was unsafe and mounted a campaign in opposition, Robbins fought back. At a hearing six years ago, scores of supporters showed up wearing painters’ caps that read: “Yes. In My Back Yard.”

And so, 15 miles south of Chicago’s heroic skyline, the Robbins Resource Recovery Facility opened a year ago. Its white smokestack towers over an archipelago of aging communities, “like the Washington Monument of Chicago’s south suburbs,” says Rep. Jesse L. Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.), whose congressional district includes Robbins.

But things have not gone as planned. Months before the plant opened, environmental groups prodded Illinois lawmakers to repeal a generous tax subsidy for incinerators like it. Without that, the firm that owns the garbage burner, Foster Wheeler Corp., has been unable to turn a profit, and Robbins, in turn, has collected only a fraction of the money that town officials had been counting on as part of the deal.

As a result, the town is arguably worse off than before. The plant’s location has strained further the uneasy relationship between Robbins and its more prosperous neighbors. Already barren of any real economic development, the town is saddled with a soaring, smoke-belching trash burner that shoos away commercial investment like a scarecrow guarding a cornfield.

“Nobody wants to be next to an incinerator,” Jackson said. “It’s not development. It’s de-development.”

This hamlet’s futile efforts to salvage a future from other people’s garbage offers lessons on environmental discrimination and the placement of disproportionate numbers of unwanted waste facilities, chemical plants and refineries in poor, minority communities. Complicated by history, contorted by racial suspicions, Robbins’ struggle for solvency challenges pat definitions of victimhood and capitalism.

“Everybody got all in an uproar when we said we wanted to bring Foster Wheeler in here,” said Robbins Mayor Irene Brodie, a soft-spoken but blunt woman who lobbied for the incinerator. “They said it was bad for the environment and all, but hmmm. . . .” She paused for a second, then continued resolutely. “Didn’t nobody ever come out and protest the fact that we were poor? How come nobody ever protested that?”

The paradox of Robbins’ deferred dreams is this: Outside the plant’s gates sit burned-out, abandoned clapboard houses with narrow frontyards that passersby use as illicit dumps. Like the aftermath of a hellish parade, streams of trash, rubber tires, broken furniture and plastic bottles lie scattered only a few feet from a state-of-the-art, $385-million-dollar waste disposal. The city cannot easily afford to clean up the mess.

Executives from Foster Wheeler left their 1988 meeting with Robbins’ elected officials slightly stunned, but clearly intrigued by the possibilities. “They did more selling to us than we did to them,” said Neal, the corporate executive who has since left the company. “It was obviously a poor town. I think the leaders just saw that their town was dying and they wanted to do something about it.”

Foster Wheeler officials did the math and calculated that a taxpayer subsidy could boost annual profits from a plant in Robbins to $23 million. A deal was struck. From its profits, Foster Wheeler would pay its host nearly $2 million annually in rent, doubling the town’s yearly revenue.

But the proposal quickly hatched a forceful, organized campaign to keep the incinerator from ever opening in Robbins. Greenpeace and other environmental activists said that an incinerator burning 1,600 tons of refuse a day would release dangerous levels of mercury and other pollutants. Robbins’ neighbors joined the protests, arguing that their homes and families were in harm’s way.

Foster Wheeler used its deep pockets to buy billboards and newspaper ads--as well as the painters’ caps worn by Robbins residents in support of the proposed facilities. Company executives assured residents that they planned to install the safest, state-of-the art equipment available.

But rallies and public hearings were contentious, and attended at times by hundreds of supporters and opponents. Not everyone from Robbins endorsed the incinerator. Clergy members and others decried what they characterized as the exploitation of a destitute town, desperate for development of any kind. But environmentalists admittedly had a difficult time recruiting blacks from Robbins to join their effort. And while some blacks were not supportive, virtually all whites who attended rallies, protests or public meetings were opposed to the plant and lived outside of Robbins, a fact that did not escape Brodie and others who supported the site.

Environmental activists failed to keep the incinerator from opening, but their campaign was two-pronged. With the help of fiscally conservative Democrats and Republicans in the Illinois Legislature, they successfully lobbied for a repeal of the substantive taxpayer subsidy--nearly $360 million over 20 years--that made the conversion of trash to energy so appealing in the first place.

“It was a license to print money at taxpayer expense,” said Jeff Tangel, an organizer of the anti-burner campaign. “Taxpayers were paying for their own poisoning.’

The repeal, and the refusal of more than a dozen of Robbins’ neighbors to send their refuse to the incinerator, is causing Foster Wheeler to lose about $1 million a month at its Robbins operation, according to the company. Because Robbins’ rent payments from the incinerator are based largely on the incinerator’s profitability, the town is scheduled to collect only about $400,000 of the nearly $2 million it had expected.

Foster Wheeler has sued the state, arguing that because its plant was under construction when lawmakers rescinded the tax incentive, the Robbins plant should have been “grandfathered” in. But company executives acknowledge that they cannot operate indefinitely a plant that is losing money.

The state’s environmental protection agency said that the Robbins plant has, in recent months, violated the conditions of its operating permit. But the excess emissions are not egregious, they say, and not particularly worrisome.

Brodie, for her part, remains optimistic. Despite its financial woes, Foster Wheeler has fulfilled one part of its agreement with the town, providing full college scholarships for 12 students from Robbins.

“That’s 12 kids who might not have gone to school otherwise,” she said proudly. “The school board [which Robbins shares with several surrounding suburbs] sure wasn’t going to give those kids full scholarships to college. There’s always been environmental racism. We’re just making it work for us for once.”