Battery Metals

Facing a federal complaint and legal pressure from the city, a bulk storage operator on the Southeast Side will stop storing toxic manganese outside and suspend barge transfers during high winds to reduce harmful dust blowing into surrounding neighborhoods.

Pittsburgh-based S.H. Bell Co. agreed last month to follow a plan outlined by the Chicago Department of Public Health after Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration rejected the company’s proposed overhaul of the way it handles manganese, a heavy metal used in steelmaking that can permanently damage the nervous system and trigger learning difficulties, memory loss and anxiety.

Neighbors are increasingly concerned about the facility, prompted in part by what they have learned about problems with a similar S.H. Bell operation in Ohio and by preliminary results from a University of Illinois at Chicago study that tested the toenails of neighborhood children for manganese.

About 20,000 people, including 1,730 children age 5 and younger, live within a mile of S.H. Bell’s Chicago facility.

The promised improvements come more than three years after investigators stumbled across the storage terminal, between 101st and 103rd Streets, while taking a closer look at two nearby sites that stored dusty piles of lung-damaging petroleum coke along the Calumet River.

Since then neighborhood activists have urged federal, state and local authorities to crack down on local polluters with the same intensity that forced petcoke storage operators to eliminate their piles and change their handling practices.

“We cannot wait any longer,” representatives from a coalition of neighborhood and health groups wrote in a Dec. 19 letter to Emanuel, citing an urgent need to protect children in light of the UIC manganese study.

The UIC researchers have not published their results. But they have told neighborhood groups that their preliminary findings suggest children in the area have higher manganese levels than kids from other parts of the city, according to the letter.

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A chemistry team at the University of Waterloo, Canada, has achieved what may be a major breakthrough in battery technology. Led by Chemistry Professor Linda Nazar, the team discovered that the performance of a lithium-sulfur battery can be boosted dramatically by using a nanosheet of manganese dioxide. The increase has the potential to propel an electric vehicle three times further than a lithium-ion battery of the same weight.

Tripling the range of electric motorcycles could provide a huge boost to the fledgling industry by removing the primary concern most potential buyers have with the technology. If battery life can be extended in kind, and costs kept in line by volume production, acceptance of electric motorcycles will likely improve significantly.

“This is a major step forward and brings the Li-S battery one step closer to reality,” said Nazar, who also holds the Canada Research Chair in Solid State Energy Materials.

The study revealed that the surface of the manganese dioxide nanosheet essentially transforms the sulfur cathode of a Li-S battery into a high-performance cathode that can recharge more than 2,000 times. Cathodes and anodes are the two electrodes of a battery, separated by an electrolyte solution. Sulfur, which is an extremely abundant, relatively light, and very cheap battery material, historically hasn’t worked as a cathode material because it dissolves into the electrolyte solution as the battery discharges.

The university reported that previous research by Nazar found that metallic titanium oxide could work to stabilize the sulfur, but the research published this week shows that nanosheets of manganese dioxide work even better. The main goal of this paper is to explain the mechanism at work. The chemical reaction that stabilizes the sulfur is similar to a chemical process discovered in 1845 during the golden age of German sulfur chemistry.

Chicago public health officials have signed off on a Southeast Side company’s updated plan to cut emissions of brain-damaging manganese dust that regulators say pose a health risk to nearby residents.

At its storage terminal along the Calumet River, S.H. Bell Co. has agreed to “a number of aggressive proactive mitigation measures,” according to a letter from Chicago’s Department of Public Health. Under the plan, approved late last month, the company agrees to no longer store manganese-containing materials outdoors, suspend operations involving manganese in high-wind conditions and increase the number of dust-monitoring inspections.

“We expect all companies to comply with our strict environmental standards and are prepared to take all appropriate steps necessary to protect our residents and communities,” said Julie Morita, the city’s public health commissioner, in a statement.

After reviewing an earlier version of the plan, the city notified S.H. Bell in August that it needed to submit a “more robust, quantifiable and protective” strategy to control pollutants, including manganese, a metal that is essential to steelmaking but that can cause neurological defects similar to Parkinson’s disease at high exposures, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. The notice came one week after the EPA cited the Pittsburgh-based company’s Chicago facility with violations of the Clean Air Act for exceeding federal health standards related to manganese.

The agency found average manganese concentrations that exceeded a federal threshold of 0.3 micrograms per cubic meter of air over a four-month period, which the EPA said created a health risk to residents living nearby. The facility is situated across the street from rows of single-family homes in the East Side neighborhood, a community of predominantly low-income and minority residents that spent years fighting for increased protection from lung-damaging petcoke dust stored at nearby sites.

Nearly 20,000 people, including more than 6,000 children, live within 1 mile of the company’s storage site.

The health department’s letter also states that average monthly concentrations of manganese at S.H. Bell have decreased since the city increased inspections at the facility following the EPA’s notice of violation.

“S.H. Bell is committed to ensuring a safe and healthy environment for the community and our employees,” the company said in a statement. “We worked closely with the city to develop our recently approved dust control plan that goes above and beyond local, state and federal regulations. The city of Chicago has among the strongest bulk material handling regulations in the nation, and we believe that all facilities in the region should also be in compliance.”

The decision on S.H. Bell’s plan came days after the city announced that it would require a nearby company to install air monitors to detect levels of manganese and other toxic metals. Watco Transloading, a competitor of S.H. Bell, now has three months to install the monitors at its facility 3 miles down the Calumet River.

Preliminary results from an ongoing University of Illinois at Chicago study of toxic metals on the Southeast Side found that children in the area have higher levels of manganese in their toenails than children in other parts of Chicago.

In addition to the UIC study, the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry is evaluating manganese data from air monitors that S.H. Bell was forced to install earlier this year as a result of previous violations.

Several Southeast Side advocacy groups have called on Chicago to ban the storage or handling of manganese in residential areas, including at S.H. Bell.