Chicago Incinerators

People used to burn their own trash. I remember, as a kid in the 1950s, taking the trash out to a far corner of our backyard where we had a cylinder made from glorified metal fencing material. I would pour the trash into the cylinder and light it with a match. But Fort Wayne, as well as Chicago, made a rule that people can't burn their trash, and later, leaves in the Fall, because of air pollution. So the cities needed to collect and dispose of trash. By 1959, Chicago was getting all of its swamps, clay pits and quarries filled with trash. ("According to the Encyclopedia of Chicago, many Chicago buildings and streets stand on as much as 12 feet of 19th century trash.") And it was building "mountains" up to 17 stories high. [Baer] So to reduce the volume of material going to landfills, the city built incinerators. Fly ash is 1/10 the volume of trash.

Rod Sellers posted
Where am I?

Rod Sellers commented on his post
Answer: Calumet Incinerator at 103rd and Doty. When it was built it was supposed to be the beginning of the end of landfills. Didn't work out that way. Attached photo is from the Daily Calumet March 6, 1959.
[The city has repurposed that land as an auto pound.]

Daniel Bovino posted

The Calumet Incinerator with its distinctive bouquet that would periodically permeate our neighborhood, 103rd and Doty Avenue. Different aromas, to me, were based on the wind. I learned directions based on smell... Wind from the Northeast: Jays Potato Chips, East: The incinerator, Southeast: Sherwin Williams, South: Torino Bakery West: not much..

Photo by the late Dr. Gene Ossello.

[There are lots of interesting comments about this plant producing one of several "industrial smells" in the neighborhood. It sounds like the champion stinker was Sherwin Williams "that belched tons of toluene sulphonic acid vapor."]

In addition to the Calumet Incinerator, the city had the Medill, Southwest and Northwest Incinerators. I have yet to find where the Southwest and Medill incinerators were. The Northwest Incinerator became operational in 1971, just as the other ones were being shut down because of pollution. [GarbageWars, pp133-134]

Baer, 1971-1996, the building was torn down in 2015.

This is now a transfer station. They left the smokestacks when it was torn down.

Street View, May 2024

When built in 1971, the Northwest Incinerator was the largest in North America. It could burn 400,000 tons of garbage a year. "When it opened, during the long tenure of Mayor Richard J. Daley, incineration of solid waste was believed to be an environmentally sound alternative to landfills, and the pollution-mitigating technology of the facility was state of the art for the time. But according to witness reports, the smoke from its chimneys often smelled extremely foul.... According to DePaul soil scientist James Montgomery, who visited the site in 1993, a visible layer of soot coated the ground and windows around the incinerator." Lead contamination was one of the pollution problems that they could not solve. It was emitting 17 pounds of lead per hour. [CityBureau]

Actually, the lead emissions were 5-17 pounds per hour. It sold steam to Brachs Candy factory. The fly ash, which is 10% of the original volume, was deposited in Stearns Quarry.  [AreaChicagoArchive]

There is an incinerator plant in Robins, IL, but when I researched it, it was closed.