As a student at Huntington Park High in the early 2000s, Milton Hernandez Nimatuj said they often woke up to the stench of dead animals.

Some days were worse than others. But when the odor was especially intense, they said it permeated everything. Hernandez Nimatuj was left nauseated, with a headache, and in no mood for breakfast.

Often, the stench would show up on campus. During band practice, out on the football field, it was tough to play the clarinet while inhaling that putrid air.

Two decades later, Hernandez Nimatuj now lives a few miles away in Walnut Park and says the smell still vexes them. Occasionally, it seeps into their home, but it’s been less intense in recent months.

Community members in Southeast L.A. have long complained about putrid odors — smells air regulators have tied to a handful of nearby rendering companies, which recycle expired meat from grocery stores and dead animal carcasses from farms into other products. Those regulators have called the smell generated by these plants “unique and unmistakable.”

The nearby city of Vernon is an industrial hub that’s long been home base for many of the companies who do this processing in Southern California. Though the numbers have changed over the years — Farmer John, for example, closed last spring — an LAist review earlier this month found four rendering plants, six slaughterhouses and at least 40 meat processors located in or very near Vernon. And the smells can travel fast to nearby cities. Air quality regulators say shifting wind patterns can carry smells several miles in just a few minutes.

Milton Hernandez Nimatuj photographed at the Huntington Park High School football field where he performed while in the marching band as a student.

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Samanta Helou Hernandez

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In interviews with LAist, many Southeast L.A. residents — including local elected officials, environmental justice activists, and other community members — acknowledge that rendering companies play an important role in reducing food waste. They also acknowledge that community members who live nearby have to cope with smells that can be severe.

The fight for reforms, many told us, can feel neverending.

One rendering company fights to fully reopen

In recent years, one rendering company in the area has violated more air quality rules than any other: Baker Commodities, Inc.

The South Coast Air Quality Management District (AQMD), which regulates air pollution in the region, temporarily shut down Baker in the fall of 2022 after an inspector found that it had violated a rule meant to keep odors from seeping into surrounding neighborhoods. That rule, adopted in 2017, was informed by concerns from dozens of stakeholders, including rendering companies, local unions, environmental groups, students, and churches. When Baker was shut down, many community members celebrated it as a win.

In interviews with LAist, community members say since Baker stopped rendering dead animals, the smell problems have dissipated over the last year but have not gone away completely. Hernandez Nimatuj was among a half dozen residents who provided sworn testimony during a public hearing last fall, arguing that Baker was harming the community and should be closed.

Baker was allowed to reopen in a limited capacity in June; they’re back to treating trap grease and wastewater. The rendering company is currently in a legal battle with AQMD to try to fully reopen and continue the rendering of animal remains. Baker is also trying to keep photos that show inside its facility in Vernon from public view.

Zombies and petroleum bubbles

Growing up , Hernandez Nimatuj says the odor issues weren’t the only problem. They also remember ooze bubbling up on the playground at Park Avenue Elementary in the city of Cudahy.

“I remember popping [the bubbles],” they said. “I remember jumping on them.”

When Hernandez Nimatuj was in second grade, they said, the sixth graders spread a creepy rumor: The school was built on a playground, and zombies were trying to come out.

Hernandez Nimatuj didn’t learn the truth until high school.

Milton Hernandez Nimatuj photographed at the Huntington Park High School.

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Samanta Helou Hernandez

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LAist

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Baker Commodities, Inc. in Vernon, CA.

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Samanta Helou Hernandez

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Communities for Better Environment, a nonprofit that’s advocated for clean air, soil, and water since the 1970s, has hosted “Toxic Tours” for decades. In Southern California, these tours take participants on journeys around Southeast L.A. and Wilmington in the South Bay. The tours highlight the impact of industrial polluters on residents’ health and quality of life. They also explain how community members fought back against environmental injustices in the area.

Hernandez Nimatuj hopped on a tour for the first time in the summer of 2000. Through this experience, they learned that the stench of decaying animals came from rendering companies in and near the city of Vernon. And those bubbles at Park Avenue Elementary? That was petroleum waste — the school had been built on an old city dump.

The tour inspired Hernandez Nimatuj to become an environmental justice activist. Before graduating from Huntington Park High, they were among community members who led efforts to keep a power plant from being built in 2001 in the neighboring city of South Gate.

Soil contamination risks in Vernon, included the large contamination zone left by the Exide lead battery plant.

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Courtesy City of Vernon

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Geotracker, Envirostor, Department of Toxic Substances Control, City of Vernon

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Hernandez Nimatuj now works at the nonprofit as a program director and has helped lead “Toxic Tours.” In Southeast L.A., this often includes pit stops at their old elementary schools, as well as the site of a scrap metal recycler in Maywood that exploded in 2016. The guides also take participants to the now-shuttered Exide battery recycling plant in Vernon, which spewed lead and arsenic into thousands of homes. Baker, the rendering company that was shut down last year, is located across the street.

Dilia Ortega, youth program coordinator at Communities for a Better Environment, photographed near the now closed Exide plant.

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Samanta Helou Hernandez

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A sign outside the former Exide facility.

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Spreading awareness, door to door

East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice, a nonprofit founded by residents of Commerce and East L.A. in 2001, has also worked to spread awareness about the source of rendering odors.

In 2009, East Yard members distributed door hangers throughout the area, much like the type you might see during an election campaign.

The offices of East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice.

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The materials included a magnet featuring the number for AQMD’s complaint hotline, so residents would know where to call if they smelled a problem.

mark! Lopez, East Yard’s community organizer and special projects coordinator, lives in unincorporated East L.A. He said the rendering odors have repeatedly driven him and his daughters inside the house, robbing them of their right to enjoy the outdoors.

“Rendering plants are something that everyone is aware of, but may not be able to name,” Lopez said. "Community members might say, ‘It smells like dead dog’ or, ‘It smells like throw up,’" he added, but, “everyone knows the smell.”

Most residents don’t know rendering companies exist, Lopez added. And if they do, they often don’t know they can call air regulators when the stench gets out of hand.

“So community education was really key,” he said in reference to East Yard’s door-to-door campaign.

mark! Lopez is a community organizer and special projects coordinator at East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice.

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Remediation work underway in Southeast L.A.

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Erika Bojorquez is a longtime resident of the city of Commerce and lives just a few miles from the rendering plants in Vernon. When she found out about AQMD’s complaint hotline through East Yard, she saved the number on her phone. Then, she shared it with her neighbors.

When the stench comes, said Bojorquez, “I go, knocking on neighbors’ [doors]. ‘Alright, guys, I smell it! Let’s all report it.’”

Last fall, she voiced her frustration in an email to AQMD, calling for Baker’s shut down until the company comes into compliance with odor rules.

“I have lived here since I was 12 and this has ALWAYS been an issue,” she wrote. “Now that I am 34 years old, I know the name for this: Environmental Racism. This would never be allowed if our community's demographic was affluent and white.”

Worries about “another Exide”

Vernon is located about five miles southeast of Downtown Los Angeles. During the day, some 55, 000 people run the city’s 1,800 businesses. Fleets of semi trucks come and go. But at night, the population plummets. Census records show just 222 residents live in the city.

“The founding purpose of this municipality was to attract factories,” said Philip Ethington, professor of history, political science and spatial sciences at USC. The other goal was to consolidate industrial work, and keep it away from nearby cities to help preserve property values in the region, he said.

Vernon is a city that's almost exclusively industrial located near Downtown Los Angeles and Boyle Heights.

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As a result , when it comes to environmental issues, “there's a disproportionate impact on blue collar people who work in these areas or need to live near them,” Ethington added.

Cities like Vernon that are almost entirely industrial, he said, are focused on generating the maximum amount of revenue, sometimes at the expense of those residents.

Community members don’t dispute that rendering work at Baker is a positive alternative to having animal remains pile up in trash cans and landfills. But in interviews with LAist, many of them expressed distrust in so-called “green” businesses that recycle industrial byproducts.

Baker has declined multiple interview requests from LAist. In a statement, spokesperson Jimmy Andreoli II, whose family owns the company, said Baker is “dedicated to finding sustainable ways to support California’s food production and restaurant industries with continued strict adherence to local, state, and federal environmental laws.” On its website, the company says it plays “an essential role in protecting the environment.”

Signs outside the former Exide facility.

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When discussing the role of recycling centers in the area and Baker’s lawsuit against air regulators, community members interviewed by LAist often pointed to Exide Technologies, the now-shuttered battery recycling plant once housed in Vernon. For decades, it exposed employees and surrounding communities to brain-damaging lead and other toxic pollutants.

Production at Exide stopped in 2014. Then, in 2020, the company declared bankruptcy and a federal court allowed it to evade its obligations to clean up lead and other toxic contamination — leaving California taxpayers to foot the bill for its mess. Thousands of Southeast L.A. residents are still waiting for the lead and other toxic chemicals to be removed from the soil around their homes.

In 2019, researchers at USC worked closely with East Yard and Resurrection Church in Boyle Heights to gather baby teeth of children who lived within a two-mile radius of Exide. To do this, they reached out to the children’s parents, inviting them to participate in their “Truth Fairy” project.

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Courtesy USC Environmental Health Centers

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The researchers’ goal was to gauge prenatal and early childhood exposure to toxic metals. Ultimately, they found high amounts of lead in the teeth of children from Boyle Heights, Commerce, East L.A., Maywood, and Huntington Park — twice as high as for children studied in a similar urban community in Boston. According to the researchers, lead exposure in childhood can cause brain damage, stunted growth, and problems with learning.

While the environmental issues created by rendering plants are different, community members' experience with Exide has made many distrustful. Karina Macias, a council member from Huntington Park, told LAist she worries that if Baker is allowed to fully reopen without fully complying with the air quality rule, it could become “another Exide situation.”

A caution sign outside the former Exide facility.

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In an interview with LAist in Commerce, longtime resident Jason Gardea Stinnett reflected on what it was like to grow up surrounded by freeways and train tracks, among rendering odors and a company that belched lead.

He noted that when new companies try to open up in the area, they often emphasize the jobs they’ll create. He thinks it’s equally important to weigh the potential impact on health and quality of life.

“People build this infrastructure, they build these companies, they profit from it. But the people that are paying the biggest part of the bill are the people that live around those places,” he said. “We’re the ones breathing the air, it’s our children playing in the lead-contaminated dirt.”