Unattended Death and Biohazard Cleanup in Stickney, IL

Stickney is a village in Cook County, Illinois, a southwest suburb of Chicago located about 12 miles from the Chicago Loop.

Stickney was incorporated in 1913, growing up along the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal corridor southwest of the city.

The 2020 census counted 7,110 people in Stickney, up from 6,786 in 2010, making it one of the inner-ring suburbs that actually grew during that decade.

Stickney has about 2,400 households packed into less than 2 square miles of land, giving it a dense, streetcar-suburb feel.

During Prohibition in the 1920s and 1930s, Stickney was notorious as home to several bordellos and speakeasies owned by Chicago gangster Al Capone, according to Cook County's hazard mitigation history of the village.

Stickney lends its name to the Stickney Water Reclamation Plant, operated by the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago, which has been billed as the world's largest wastewater treatment plant since its first section opened in 1930.

The Stickney plant treats an average of about 700 million gallons of wastewater a day and can handle up to 1.44 billion gallons a day during wet weather.

The plant serves more than 2.4 million people in Chicago and 46 suburban communities, and its treated water is discharged into the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, flowing on toward the Des Plaines, Illinois, and Mississippi rivers.

The Stickney plant also hosts what the Water Environment Federation honored as the world's largest nutrient recovery facility, which pulls phosphorus and nitrogen out of wastewater and turns them into fertilizer.