Michael Hawthorne

If a company dumped the black goop behind a factory, it would violate all sorts of environmental laws and face an expensive hazardous-waste cleanup. But playgrounds, parking lots and driveways in many communities are coated every spring and summer with...

Metra today said it is installing more efficient air filters on its train cars and switching to cleaner fuel for its locomotives to help reduce commuter exposure to toxic diesel fumes. Responding to a Tribune investigation, the rail service also...

Federal regulators on Tuesday urged nationwide testing for cancer-causing hexavalent chromium, the latest response to a study that found the heavy metal in tap water from Chicago and more than two dozen other cities. In a memo to public water systems,...

In a move that could help clean up Chicago's chronically dirty air, the Obama administration on Thursday brokered a legal deal that cracks down on some of the biggest sources of pollution along the southern shore of Lake Michigan. As part of the...

Chicago will begin routine testing for hexavalent chromium after a recent study found worrisome levels of the cancer-causing metal in tap water pumped to 7 million people in the city and suburbs. City officials announced the additional testing Tuesday,...

U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin today warned that budget battles in the nation’s capital could thwart Metra’s efforts to clean up toxic diesel pollution breathed every day by hundreds of thousands of Chicago-area commuters. The 2011 spending bill...

Under pressure to hold down skyrocketing costs that promise more expensive electric bills for dozens of Midwest cities, developers agreed Friday to cap the construction budget for a massive coal-fired power plant in downstate Illinois. The Prairie...

In virtually every other city in the nation, it would be illegal to pump out partially treated sewage teeming with the amount of disease-causing bacteria that churns endlessly into the Chicago River. That may soon change for Chicago. But as a state...

Despite growing health concerns about atrazine, an agricultural weedkiller sprayed on farm fields across the Midwest, most drinking water is tested for the chemical only four times a year -- so rarely that worrisome spikes of the chemical likely go...

Chicago is the only U.S. metro area that would fail to meet a tougher standard for smog-forming nitrogen oxides proposed Monday by the Obama administration. The more stringent limit is intended to help protect people who suffer from asthma and other...

The Tribune’s scoop about the Obama administration’s order to clean up the Chicago River came after years of reporting about the urban waterway. Taking multiple trips on the river, reading scores of dry-but-important documents and conducting...

It took years for Illinois officials to discover that southwest suburban Crestwood was pumping contaminated water to its residents, in part because the state took village officials at their word that nothing was wrong. Such lax oversight is a problem...