The Collateral Damage of Small Town USA
Growing up, the shadow of the Millstone Nuclear Power Plant was a constant, quiet hum in the background of my childhood.
You learn early on what it feels like to live next to an environmental wild card—a facility where the true cost of “production” isn’t always something you can see until the alarms are already ringing. It instills a specific kind of dread: the fear of the invisible threat.
History is littered with towns that found out too late that the invisible threat was already at their doorstep.
In the 1970s, the residents of Times Beach, Missouri, thought they were just getting their dirt roads sprayed to keep the summer dust down. It took over a decade for the EPA to admit that the “waste oil” coating their town was actually laced with deadly dioxin, turning the municipality into a toxic ghost town that eventually had to be bulldozed and buried.
When corporate cost-cutting meets regulatory silence, communities become collateral damage.
Which brings us to Rapid City, and the 563-acre industrial footprint of GCC Dacotah. For 25 years, this massive cement and mining operation has existed in a municipal zoning void—a quarter-century regulatory blackout in our own backyard. And while our roads aren’t being sprayed with waste oil, we need to ask ourselves: what exactly is being burned in those kilns?
A 25-year administrative blackout doesn’t just mean misplaced paperwork; it means a critical lack of community oversight.
While residents are left in the dark, industrial giants quietly optimize their bottom lines. In the case of GCC Dacotah, that optimization looks a lot like what we traditionally call a tire fire — and the federal government already signed off on it.
What’s Already Been Approved, Quietly
For years, the corporate playbook has leaned heavily on “alternative fuels” to cut coal costs.
Behind the clinical, regulatory language of federal correspondence lies a stark reality: in 2020, with almost no local notice, the EPA approved GCC Dacotah’s request to burn Auto Shredder Residue (ASR) — the plastic, foam, rubber belts, and scrap left over after junked cars are stripped of metal — as fuel in its Rapid City cement kiln.
Let’s strip away the corporate jargon. The EPA’s own documentation reveals that 20 to 50% of this material is a highly combustible cocktail of dashboard plastics, foam seating, rubber belts, and scrap tires.
Here’s the part that should stop you cold: the entire approval rests on data GCC supplied about itself.
EPA’s letter spells it out plainly — the agency would consider ASR a non-waste fuel “provided specifications in your request are maintained,” and warns that “if these specifications are not maintained, the Agency may reach a different conclusion.”
In other words, the federal government’s blessing is conditional on an honor system, based on test results from 2015 and 2018, administered from an office in Washington, D.C., for a kiln that sits at the center of a 563-acre footprint bordering our neighborhoods.
Five years later, in a city that still can’t get its own zoning map to reflect what’s actually operating on that 563 acres, who is checking whether GCC is still meeting the conditions it promised back in 2020?
Nobody — because almost nobody here even knows to ask. This is the same 25-year pattern of administrative drift that produced the zoning gap, showing up again in what’s legally allowed to go into the air we breathe.
A Familiar Pattern
And when it comes to accountability, GCC’s parent company has a track record worth knowing.
Grupo Cementos de Chihuahua spent years fighting a $36 million arbitration judgment — first losing in Bolivia’s courts, then watching a U.S. federal court in Colorado confirm the award and order company assets seized to satisfy it, then losing again on appeal to the Tenth Circuit.
An international conglomerate that fights a confirmed legal judgment across two countries and multiple courts for nearly a decade tells you something about how it weighs the cost of accountability against the cost of compliance.
That is the corporate culture standing behind the entity whose self-reported data is the only thing standing between “non-waste fuel” and a kiln full of shredded car interiors.
The Rapid City GCC on site Fatality
We do not need to look at international courts to see the consequences of this corporate culture; the tragic results are already on the record right here in Rapid City.
On February 22, 2025, a contractor died at the GCC Dacotah facility when a bridge providing access into the kiln shifted, causing the equipment he was operating to fall backward into a chute.
The subsequent Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) investigation revealed that the mine operator bolted the bridge to a pedestal but failed to secure it to the floor as required by the manufacturer’s manual.
Furthermore, investigators found that the operator did not develop or provide the necessary installation training for the bridge assembly, directly contributing to the fatal accident.
Whether it’s a bolt that was never secured to the floor or fuel specifications that were never re-verified, the pattern is the same: self-certification, minimal local oversight, and a community that finds out only after something goes wrong — or, in this case, only because someone finally asked.
Historical Environmental Disasters
This isn’t an abstract corporate exercise. Look at Niagara Falls, New York, where for over a decade Hooker Chemical Company quietly buried 20,000 tons of toxic chemical waste in an old canal bed, then sold the land for a dollar with a buried liability disclaimer. Houses and a school went up on top of it.
By the late 1970s, the chemicals were leaching into basements, children were getting chemical burns on the playground, and the federal government had to evacuate hundreds of families and declare a state of emergency. Love Canal became the reason Congress created the Superfund program — because nobody had been watching what was buried beneath the neighborhood until it was too late.
Look at West Virginia, too. The history of Appalachian coal mining is a tragic syllabus on what happens when communities surrender their backyards to industry.
It is the abandoned ghost towns like Hammond, where former industries extracted what they needed and eventually left only ruins behind. These tragedies all share the same DNA: corporations acting with impunity, regulatory agencies turning a blind eye, and communities left holding the bag.
Time to Take Our Backyards Back
We build our backyards to be safe havens, not buffer zones for corporate fallout. But for 25 years, the residents surrounding the GCC Dacotah plant have been unknowingly living in a 563-acre regulatory blind spot — one where even the federal approvals that exist were granted on the company’s own word, five years ago, with no local mechanism to confirm they still hold true today.
It is time to pull the plug on the 25-year blackout.
We need confirmation that GCC is still meeting the conditions of its 2020 ASR fuel approval.
We need our municipal leaders to finally draw a hard zoning line in the sand.
And we need to stop assuming that a federal letter from 2020 means anyone, anywhere, is still checking. Because the slow burn has gone on long enough, and it is time to take our backyards back.
The Health Risks of Burning Auto Shredder Residue & Tires
It’s worth noting that EPA’s 2018 testing data — the data underlying the 2020 approval — showed most contaminants in GCC’s ASR fuel at levels comparable to or lower than coal, including zero measured sulfur.
That data is now several years old, self-reported by the company, and there is no public record of anyone re-verifying it since. The following is what the broader scientific literature says about what can be released when ASR and tires are burned — context for understanding what’s at stake if those 2018 conditions are no longer being met.
The Incineration of ASR and Health Dynamics
The incineration of ASR (which inherently includes plastics, PVC, synthetic rubber, and tires) is a scientifically documented health hazard. When these materials are introduced to industrial kilns, they release specific, highly dangerous compounds into the surrounding air and ash:
- Dioxins and Furans: Created directly by the combustion of chlorinated materials like PVC plastics (found abundantly in vehicle interiors and ASR). The World Health Organization classifies dioxin as a known human carcinogen. Chronic exposure is linked to endocrine disruption, severe immune system suppression, liver toxicity, and reproductive health issues.
- Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) and Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs): The burning of automotive tires and rubber releases highly toxic compounds including benzene, styrene, and butadiene. Butadiene is a potent liver carcinogen. These airborne emissions are directly linked to central nervous system damage, leukemia, and various other cancers.
- Heavy Metals: The combustion process releases heavy metals like lead, cadmium, mercury, and arsenic into the air and the residual ash. These metals penetrate the cardiovascular, neurological, and reproductive systems, posing a severe risk to long-term community health.
- Fine Particulate Matter (PM2.5): The smoke generated contains microscopic particulate matter that bypasses the body’s natural defenses and penetrates deep into lung tissue. This is a primary driver of long-term respiratory diseases, including asthma and chronic bronchitis, with children and the elderly facing the highest risk of hospitalization.
Citation Index
- The Rapid City Sentinel — GCC Dacotah 563-acre zoning investigation, ongoing series
- EPA Office of Resource Conservation and Recovery, letter to Jim Anderson, GCC Dacotah Inc., Nov. 12, 2020, Non-Waste Fuel Determination for Auto Shredder Residue (rcrapublic.epa.gov/files/14937.pdf)
- Compañía de Inversiones Mercantiles S.A. v. Grupo Cementos de Chihuahua S.A.B. de C.V., 58 F.4th 429 (10th Cir. 2023); U.S. District Court, District of Colorado, confirmation order, March 26, 2019 ($36.1M)
- Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) — Feb. 22, 2025 Fatality, Final Report, GCC Dacotah
- Love Canal history — SUNY Geneseo, Britannica, Center for Health Environment & Justice
- YouTube: The Missouri Ghost Town Poisoned By Toxic Waste (Times Beach)
- Rapid City Council Agenda, June 15, 2026; Rapid City Planning Commission, June 11, 2026 meeting (26RZ011 continuance to July 9, 2026)
CIVIC ALERT: TOMORROW’S CITY COUNCIL MEETING
Tomorrow, June 15, 2026, 6:30 PM — Rapid City Council Chambers, 300 6th Street.
Three ordinances affecting the GCC Dacotah 563-acre footprint are up for first reading tomorrow: Ordinance 6718 (26RZ008), Ordinance 6719 (26RZ009), and Ordinance 6720 (26RZ010) — all part of the 25-year rezoning correction this paper has been documenting. A first reading introduces an ordinance but doesn’t enact it; final passage typically comes at a second reading roughly two weeks later, often with a public hearing where residents can speak.
A fourth related rezoning, 26RZ011 — covering the LDR-1/Mining and Earth Resources Extraction overlap near Hidden Valley Road — was continued by the Planning Commission to July 9, 2026 for further legal clarity on land use designations. Mark your calendars for both dates if you want to be heard.
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