ELWOOD — For Stephanie Irvine, the latest proposal for a massive warehouse and logistics center in Will County came as a relief. The new plan, unveiled earlier this month, moves warehouses north of her property in Manhattan.
But for Elwood resident Terri Papish, one of the proposed buildings now sits next to her home.
“You literally have a building right on top of us,” Papish told officials with Kansas City-based NorthPoint Development during a July 8 Jackson Township community meeting.
More than 1 in 4 Illinois residents live within a half-mile of a warehouse, according to an Environmental Defense Fund report released in May. Illinois’ 43rd Senate District, which largely encompasses Will County, has more square footage for warehouses 30,000 square feet and larger than any other Senate district in the state. It ranks No. 2 in number of warehouses. One of those is CenterPoint Intermodal Center, North America’s largest inland port for trucks and rail freight.
Residents fear adding another logistics hub nearby will further degrade air quality in the region. Environmentalists are worried too. Just three miles from NorthPoint’s proposed development lies Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie, with nearly 20,000 acres of restored prairie that provide refuge for a growing bison herd and endangered grassland birds.
Meanwhile, federal regulations on diesel emission standards are likely to be weakened after the Trump administration proposed a rollback July 9, and a state bill to require emission targets and buffer zones between warehouses and nearby neighborhoods failed to advance in the General Assembly’s spring session.
“While we recognize that the warehouse itself is not putting out the pollution, so therefore they’re not monitored by the EPA the same way a manufacturing company would be monitored, they are still the driving factor behind this air pollution,” said State Sen. Rachel Ventura, the sponsor of the bill, in a recent interview. “So they do need to be a part of the solution.”
Exposure to diesel exhaust can lead to serious health conditions like asthma and respiratory illnesses and can worsen existing heart and lung disease, especially in children and the elderly, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
In Cook County and the surrounding collar counties, including Will County, emissions from heavy-duty trucks account for 22% of nitrogen dioxide pollution and contribute to more than 1,300 premature deaths each year, according to a 2025 Northwestern University study.
The EDF report found that more warehouses are being built near homes, schools and community centers than ever before, and they are disproportionately located in environmental justice communities.
Nearly 112,000 diesel trucks travel to and from warehouses that are 100,000 square feet or larger in Will County each day. More than one-third of residents live within a half-mile of a warehouse 30,000 square feet or larger.
According to Openlands, a Chicago-based land trust and conservation nonprofit, the NorthPoint proposal could bring as many as 16,000 additional diesel trucks a day to Will County.
Papish and Irvine have been fighting the NorthPoint development for 10 years through a community-led group, Just Say No to NorthPoint.
“If you go out of town, out of the immediate area of the warehouses, most people don’t realize how significant the truck traffic is, what it’s doing to the air, because they don’t see the root cause of it,” Irvine said.
After years of lawsuits with the city of Joliet, Openlands and residents, NorthPoint said it reduced the project’s industrial footprint to just over 2,000 acres and shifted warehouses north of Brown Road, which runs through Elwood and has drawn scrutiny due to its proximity to Midewin’s northern boundary.
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But that doesn’t help Papish and her husband, Ralph, who have lived on Ridge Road, north of Brown Road, for 38 years. Due to a chronic allergy to diesel exhaust, Papish said the development would force her to leave.
“I literally won’t be able to breathe,” she said. “I will be forced out if I have the diesel right on top of me.”
A regulatory loophole
Illinois has become one of the nation’s largest logistics hubs, driven by the growth of e-commerce and its proximity to Chicago’s transportation network, said Neda Deylami, attorney and senior vehicle electrification manager at the Environmental Defense Fund.
Unlike factories or power plants, logistics facilities do not directly emit pollution. Instead, the pollution comes indirectly from the thousands of trucks entering and leaving each day — what Deylami calls “magnets” for diesel traffic.
“The warehouse building itself isn’t emitting pollution. But it is responsible for bringing those emissions into communities,” Deylami said.
Brian Urbaszewski, director of environmental health programs for the Chicago-based Respiratory Health Association, said Illinois law currently leaves regulators with few options.
“We would need a change in state law to be able to say, ‘If you’re building a warehouse that’s going to attract tens of thousands of trucks each year, you need a permit,'” he said. “Right now, you don’t.”
Ventura, a Democrat from Joliet, hopes to change that.
Her proposed Warehouse Pollution Reduction Act would classify large logistics facilities as indirect sources of air pollution, allowing the state to require emissions reduction plans and other mitigation measures. The legislation would also establish emissions reduction targets and require buffer zones between warehouses and nearby neighborhoods.
Supporters of the state bill, like members of the Respiratory Health Association, view it as one of the few remaining avenues available to Illinois as federal diesel regulations face uncertainty.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency proposed rolling back limits on diesel pollution from heavy-duty vehicles and delivery trucks, a move that Urbaszewski says weakens tailpipe standards and results in more people getting sick and dying from increased diesel pollution.
“If we have several of the tools to work on this problem taken away, what do we have left?” Urbaszewski said. “This is one way to start reducing the impact of one of the largest users of trucks: warehouses.”
At the community meeting, NorthPoint project executive Brent Miles said he is willing to continue listening to residents’ concerns and work toward solutions.
Within his first year in this position, Miles said the company has reduced the project from roughly 4,000 acres to just over 2,000 acres and relocated warehouses to create more distance from Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie.
“We know there’s people that don’t want development at all. We get that,” Miles said during the July 8 meeting. “What I’m trying to do is continue to refine the plan, make the plan better overall and consolidate the plan the best we can to limit the impact to the surroundings.”
Representatives of NorthPoint couldn’t be reached for further comment about residents’ concerns and possible legislation.
Ventura said she plans to push to advance the bill in Springfield in 2027.
“We want residents to know that we hear them, that we’re listening,” Ventura said.
“You leave a place better than you found it, and these companies are not doing that,” she added. “This is just one way that they can make sure that they’re being a good community partner, to ensure that the air in and around their locations is clean.”
The ‘edge effect’
After three decades of restoration by the U.S. Forest Service and Openlands, the former Joliet Army Ammunition Plant has become one of the Midwest’s largest remaining prairie ecosystems.
In Illinois, less than 1% of the state’s original prairie remains, said Sam Chavez, director of restoration at Openlands, making Midewin a rare example of large-scale prairie restoration.
“This is one of the few places in Illinois where there’s a vision to put the prairie landscape back at a large scale,” Chavez said. “Having small fragments is not necessarily going to maintain the diversity that you need.”
But the prairie sits on the edge of one of the nation’s fastest-growing logistics corridors. As Will County farmland gives way to warehouses, distribution centers and data centers, conservationists say the landscape around Midewin is changing rapidly.
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“We’re going to be seeing in the next 10 years this huge turnover of land use,” said Sara Egan, conservation planning director for Openlands. “So we need to get ahead of land protection.”
Chavez explained that the land surrounding protected areas is often just as important as the preserves themselves. These transitional zones help buffer wildlife habitat from nearby development, a concept ecologists refer to as the “edge effect.”
“You’re shrinking the high-quality intact habitat because of the edge effect. And you can see some of the development off to the north,” Chavez said.
Midewin’s northwestern edge borders one of CenterPoint’s logistics hubs, a nearly 800-acre intermodal center. Along Hoff Road and Route 53, additional CenterPoint warehouses line the prairie’s northern boundary.
As development surrounding Midewin continues, Egan said protecting these buffer areas also safeguards benefits that extend beyond wildlife.
“These aren’t just hiking trails,” Egan said. “They’re recharging our aquifers. They’re reducing flooding. They’re improving our air quality. They’re supporting critical wildlife habitat.”
As Will County officials finalize a new comprehensive land-use plan called Guide Will County, Egan said the decisions made now will shape the region for decades.
‘We get sick’
While NorthPoint developers presented new plans to Jackson Township residents, 10 miles up the road on Route 53, warehouse workers and environmental justice groups gathered in Joliet to share the results of a two-year project to measure air pollution throughout Will County.
“Air pollution itself isn’t just some abstract global crisis, it is an invisible crisis happening right in our own backyards,” said environmental justice organizer Griselda Chavez to the crowd that gathered at Joliet’s Hartman Recreation Center.
Among those attending the clean air rally were members of Ventura’s team. Ventura said the monitors prove pollution in her district is linked to what she called “unchecked warehouse expansion.”
“Those air studies have come back and shown that we do have very high diesel particulate matter in our air, and that settles deeper into the lungs, and hence probably why we have higher asthma rates,” Ventura said.
The warehouse workers group argues that residents of Will County’s environmental justice communities bear a disproportionate share of the health impacts associated with the county’s industrial growth.
According to the EDF report, about 24% of Ventura’s district is designated as an environmental justice community, yet those neighborhoods contain more than half of the area’s warehouses.
“We know that environmental justice often hits low-income Black and brown neighborhoods the hardest,” Chavez said. “This means high rates of asthma and respiratory illness, which we know are not acceptable side effects of development. They are public health emergencies.”
Warehouse Workers for Justice partnered with Lewis University to install air quality sensors near residential homes, logistics distribution centers and major truck corridors. Joe Kozminski, Lewis University physics professor and lead researcher on the study, told the audience this data will help advance warehouse pollution regulations in Springfield.
The monitors have measured PM2.5, tiny particulate matter from diesel engines that can cause chronic health conditions like asthma.
“It’s nothing we don’t know,” said Marco Ceniceros, executive director of Warehouse Workers for Justice.
Ceniceros grew up in Chicago’s Brighton Park neighborhood between an intermodal facility and the interstate. He believes he developed asthma as an adult as a result of prolonged diesel exposure growing up.
“It’s just really important for us to have this information, so then we can take it to policymakers and say, ‘We’ve known this. Our people get sick, we get sick, and we know why, but we don’t know for sure,’” Ceniceros said. “Here (with the air quality monitors) we started to see real, concrete results, the reasons why our people are getting sick.”
Air quality monitors are scarce in Will County, Chavez said.
“We see the increases of warehousing development, truck traffic, industrial emissions,” Chavez said. “Yet we’re often left in the dark about what exactly these pollutants are that are entering our lungs and our bloodstreams every day.”