cover image Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago

Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago

David Naguib Pellow. MIT Press (MA), $30 (246pp) ISBN 978-0-262-16212-8

With more landfills per square mile than any other American city, Chicago has had some particularly colorful controversies over waste disposal over the last century. University of Colorado-Boulder sociology professor David Naguib Pellow traces these conflicts in Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago, examining how poor neighborhoods come to be burdened with a disproportionate amount of pollution and refuse. He offers background on Chicago's waste management from the 1880s to the present, focusing in particular on the struggle for environmental justice of the last two decades, and shows how ""environmentally friendly"" technologies like recycling plants and waste-to-energy incinerators actually end up adding to the pollution in poor neighborhoods. (Sept.)