Acme Steel site on Southeast Side becomes newest Chicago Superfund priority

More than 100 acres of contaminated former industrial land on the Southeast Side have been added to the government’s Superfund priority cleanup list, providing hope that a legacy of the city’s steel-making era can be converted into a park or another future recreational use.

The long-abandoned Acme Steel coke plant land is contaminated with cancer-causing chemicals and harmful metals. Coke is a hard coal-based product used to fuel giant furnaces for steel production.

The Acme location has been known to be a threat to humans and wildlife. Nearby wetlands and areas used for fishing are also threatened, the government has said.

After accepting public comments, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency added the site to the priority list for Superfund, a program started in the 1980s to clean up vacated hazardous waste sites, according to a document filed Wednesday.

Two other former industrial spots nearby have been converted into city parks, Big Marsh and Indian Ridge Marsh. The Acme property is near East 114th Street and Torrence Avenue.

“I’m excited to get some sort of movement there,” said Peggy Salazar, a retired Southeast Side environmental activist who petitioned the EPA to clean up the land.

The site joins other priority cleanups in the 10th Ward, including almost 70 acres known as the Schroud property near 126th Street and Avenue O that was once used as a dumping ground for steelmakers.

The almost 90-acre Lake Calumet Cluster near 122nd Street and Stony Island Avenue is another particularly complex remediation project. Federal officials are overseeing a plan to clean up toxic waste dumped in the area from the 1940s into the 1980s.

In 2020, the Cook County Land Bank took title of more than a third of the Acme property with plans to lease the land for a solar farm. That project fell through due to concerns about the contamination.

There are more Superfund sites in and around Chicago that have been corrected and are now used for other purposes.

For instance, La Villita Park in Little Village sits on the former site of Celotex, an asphalt roofing materials manufacturer. The city bought the land in 2012, and the park was opened two years later.

The Superfund program has long been short of money needed to tackle the many former industrial sites that left behind massive amounts of pollution. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, signed by President Joe Biden in 2021, is helping address the backlog with $3.5 billion in taxpayer funding.