Proposal to ship tons of Chicago garbage down the river is dead in the water

A proposal to ship hundreds of truckloads of Chicago garbage downstate daily on a barge from the Sanitary and Ship Canal is dead after three years of behind-the-scenes planning.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s recent decision to investigate a contaminated Southwest Side waterway off the canal persuaded garbage hauler LRS to scrap a plan that it touted as being environmentally beneficial.

LRS first approached city planning officials in early 2021 with its “sustainable barging” idea that would load garbage from a point along the canal and ship it more than 100 miles to the small central Illinois city of Henry.

The plan would save money and reduce the amount of diesel pollution from trucks that normally haul garbage for LRS, formerly known as Lakeshore Recycling Systems, the company said.

“One million gallons of diesel fuel reduced yearly,” LRS noted in a slide presentation promoting the project. That reduction in fuel would translate to eliminating 22 million pounds of carbon dioxide emissions, a major contributor to climate change, each year, LRS said. It would also reduce harmful fine particle pollution by 1.5 million pounds a year, the company added.

LRS had put the project on temporary hold after the community organization Little Village Environmental Justice Organization raised concerns that the company’s barge operation would stir up toxic materials in the nearby collateral channel just off of the canal.

Last week, company officials notified the Little Village group, other environmental and community organizations and the city to let them know that the project is being shelved.

“We have decided to pause our barging project plans indefinitely,” Joy Rifkin, LRS manager of sustainability and training, wrote in a letter. “We are glad that the EPA will investigate the contamination in the collateral channel and we look forward to the results of the investigation.”

The EPA has said that its investigation may be a “multiyear” project and will get underway in the next two years.

“The sustainable barging project was an opportunity to reduce truck traffic, greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution by barging municipal solid waste instead of trucking it,” Rifkin said in the letter.

Rifkin and LRS declined to comment through a spokesman.

Rosemont-based LRS previously said that one barge could move the equivalent of 63 semi-trailer trucks full of trash.

The city’s Department of Planning and Development began reviewing the LRS plan in 2021. By late that year, the city provided feedback to the company, including community concerns that trash would blow off the site and the barge as it was being loaded. LRS was expected to file an application for a change in zoning at its property along the canal.

Ald. Byron Sigcho-Lopez (25th) said he was concerned about the project’s impact on cleaning up the contaminated channel but wasn’t “necessarily opposing the project.” He said he’s encouraged that the EPA is looking into the remediation of the waterway, which is directly south of La Villita Park in Little Village.

The canal, built more than 120 years ago, connects the Chicago River to the Des Plaines River. From there, the barged trash would have traveled to the Illinois River to Henry, which has a population of less than 2,500.

LRS then planned to haul the garbage by trucks from Henry to a landfill in Atkinson more than 50 miles west, said Henry Mayor Jeff Bergfeld, who added that he was “very disappointed” that his city will not get expected revenue from the project.

Roughly 30 miles long, the Sanitary and Ship Canal was built to reverse the flow of the Chicago River from Lake Michigan, the city’s source of drinking water.