Editorial: Lessons from the Sterigenics case. Why allow harmful emissions so close to homes and schools?

For years, everyone who lived around the Sterigenics plant in southwest suburban Willowbrook — children, their parents, the elderly — could not see or smell the toxic danger in the air.

More than 19,000 people lived within a mile of the facility, and four schools and a day care center operated within that radius. Whether playing on school playgrounds or relaxing at backyard barbecues, those Illinoisans were unaware of the vast amounts of ethylene oxide the plant would regularly emit. The colorless, odorless compound is a known carcinogen, and it was used at the plant to sterilize medical instruments, pharmaceuticals and spices.

Between 1993 and 2017, the Tribune has reported, the plant released 254,000 pounds of the chemical into the air.

Community pressure and dogged reporting by the Tribune’s Michael Hawthorne about the plant’s emissions eventually led to Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s decision to ban the plant’s use of ethylene oxide in early 2019. Later that year, Sterigenics shut down its operations in Willowbrook.

The story doesn’t end there, however. Last week a Cook County jury found that Sterigenics, its parent company, Sotera, and Sterigenics’ predecessor at the plant, Griffith Foods, are liable for exposing Willowbrook breast cancer survivor Sue Kamuda to ethylene oxide, and awarded Kamuda $363 million in damages.

Sterigenics and Sotera have indicated they may opt to appeal the verdict, saying, “We do not believe the jury verdict in this matter reflects the evidence presented in court.”

The amount is the largest awarded to an individual in Illinois history.

More than 700 other community members are seeking damages related to the plant’s operations, so it’s reasonable to expect this saga to unfold in courtroom settings for some time.

The Kamuda verdict serves as a powerful lesson — and not only for the case’s three defendants.

There’s no question that Sterigenics’ work was valuable — medical instruments, for example, need to be sterilized before their use in hospital operating rooms. At issue was the emission of a compound as potentially harmful as ethylene oxide within a residential community. Either such operations should be situated far from where people live, work and play, or they need to be regulated and scrutinized enough to ensure they do not pose any kind of health risk to the families and people in those communities.

On that latter point, regulators and lawmakers failed in the worst way.

For years, as thousands of pounds of ethylene oxide spewed into the skies above Willowbrook and surrounding suburbs, federal regulators failed to update standards on ethylene oxide to reflect the health risk that it posed, and did not set up infrastructure to monitor the chemical’s release into the air. Emissions continued long after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency concluded in 2006 in a draft review of ethylene oxide that it was a human carcinogen.

Moreover, the federal lawmakers responsible for overseeing the work of regulators, in this case the U.S. EPA, were at fault for not ensuring that the EPA did its job.

Going forward, the Biden administration has pledged to impose tougher limits on emissions from sterilization operations. That’s good to hear, but government at every level needs to take a long look at the inherent danger in allowing companies that pose a pollution risk to operate in places surrounded by homes, child care facilities and schools.

If a plant’s owners make a case for setting up shop in a residential area, it then becomes even more important for federal, state and local regulators to require regular pollution monitoring around the plant to safeguard the health of people living nearby.

But the best solution is to simply enforce zoning that puts plants that use toxic chemicals far away from residential neighborhoods — far enough that the amount of pollutant detected on a street full of homes is zero.

That was Kamuda’s mission. She was surprised and delighted at the monetary award the jury handed her, but as she recently told WTTW News, the ultimate goal of her lawsuit against Sterigenics was “just to get them to stop and get out of our neighborhood.”

Kamuda did what she had to do. Better decisions about where this kind of industry can operate can ensure it never again gets to that point.

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