Chicago's Curbside Recycling Guide. Why Can't Chicago Recycle? If you don't have a blue cart, you can take your recyclables to one of the city's 3. If, on the other hand, you live in a building with more than four units, your garbage is picked up by private waste haulers. Your landlord is required by law to offer recycling service, but most don't and the city rarely enforces that law. If your hauler isn't recycling, you can press the building owner to comply with the law, but he doesn't really have to fear being fined for violating it. Or you can take your stuff to one of those 3. If the place you work recycles, maybe you can haul small amounts of recycling in on your commute. If you live adjacent to a neighborhood that has the blue carts, maybe you can slip your recycling into the ones across the street, if they're not already too full—but don't get caught, because it's illegal. If you live next to a park, or visit the airports regularly, maybe you can take your materials to their plentiful recycling bins. Or you can do what most Chicagoans do: say to hell with it. Right now just 8 percent of the waste from the 6. Department of Environment. The number is 1. 9 percent for buildings with private service. Based on previous studies and the success of recycling programs in Seattle, the report concludes that the city could readily raise both figures above 4. And it prevents the city from educating people about recycling because there are so many caveats. They also vowed to find new ways to bring recycling to the thousands of businesses and larger residential buildings that were never served by the blue bag program in the first place. The Climate Action Plan, as it's known, listed waste reduction and recycling as a top priority. They say that behind the scenes they're exploring all sorts of options for reducing waste and increasing recycling.
Airport Public Art Program; Shop. City of Chicago TSA Performance Report.Forest Glen is “Chicago’s. City of Chicago ordinance specifically. A look at the city of Chicago's recycling program. After years of blue bag recycling, the city is now only offering Blue Cart recycling in residential. More North Side neighborhoods are now part of the city's Blue Cart recycling program.The program will include the area from Diversey to North Avenue and Kedzie to the. But political will remains at least as big an obstacle to moving forward, according to several officials in the city's environment and Streets and Sanitation departments who spoke to me on condition that I not use their names. The Daley administration is on the defensive, insisting it's doing all it can in bad economic times but refusing to share information with the public or even members of the City Council. My request for an interview to discuss recycling with Department of Environment or Streets and San policy makers was ignored, but multiple sources told me it was rejected on direct orders from the mayor's press office. A few questions I e- mailed to the departments were answered with canned responses, though most others were also ignored. All the unnamed sources in this story said they could be fired for talking to me. But they reached out anyway because they're frustrated that the mayor and other top city leaders haven't made recycling a priority—and, worse, that these top leaders have worked hard to keep discussion of it . It found that we produced about 7. C & D) debris like concrete and steel. The other, a . It determined that most C & D debris is recycled and reused—as much as 6. But the study also found that even with the high recycling rate for C & D debris, most of Chicago's waste ends up in landfills: 5. The study authors, from a consulting and engineering firm called CDM, offered city officials some straightforward recommendations: offer blue carts citywide, provide more opportunities for residents to recycle clothing and compost organic waste, launch education and outreach programs, and start enforcing recycling laws already on the books. Officials said the blue bags would be separated out at state- of- the- art sorting facilities that cost taxpayers $6. After an initial wave of interest, though, participation dropped rapidly. And while officials claimed for the first several years that the program was keeping as much as 3. What's more, that 1. By the time the Daley administration decided to bag blue bags for good in 2. City officials refused to call it a failure—even in announcing its demise, Streets and San commissioner Michael Picardi said the city had good reasons for sticking with it so long. We pick up from 6. It would be impossible to roll this out to all of them in a year. But last summer budget officials told administrators they couldn't hire any more workers, and a halt to the blue cart rollout was made public during City Council budget hearings last fall. Aldermen whose wards never got carts weren't happy, and they continue to take heat from constituents who are angry that they're not getting the same city services as other residents. He's one of the lucky ones: most of his 3. Ward has the program. But parts of it don't. It's almost worse, quite frankly, than not having it anywhere. The city can't publicize the program anywhere because not everyone has it, so that affects participation in the areas that do have it. It's a completely half- assed approach to this. They don't want information to get out there. When I called for that meeting, other aldermen were eager to sign on. Those wards that don't have recycling, the public has demanded responses from them. You can't apportion city services in a way that's disproportionate. Current Streets and San commissioner Tom Byrne, whose department oversees the daily operations of the blue cart program, skipped it. And the aldermen didn't settle on any specific proposals for funding blue cart expansion, though Allen floated a number of ideas—including dipping into tax increment financing funds, everyone's new favorite nest egg. Allen also says the city should consider tapping into unused funds set aside for property tax rebates or beating the bushes for corporate sponsorship. Coca- Cola recently paid for about 1,2. Philadelphia. Earlier this month the Sun- Times's Fran Spielman reported that stacks upon stacks of blue carts—about 2. City employees had been shopping the story around because they're furious that the administration hasn't moved faster. City officials told me privately that Streets and San purchased the carts, at about $4. Streets and San spokesman Matt Smith was more circumspect when he e- mailed me in response to several questions I'd asked him via e- mail and voice mail. But drivers, laborers, equipment and maintenance are reoccurring costs that will exist and increase over the long haul. Chicago now gets $3. That's a difference of $5. But Smith says these figures are too fluid to count on. He didn't respond to questions about the specific costs of trucks, labor, and other program expenses. Aldermen say they're still waiting for answers to some of these same questions. Sources from inside the city tell me officials are considering a number of scenarios to pay for a blue cart expansion. One of them involves shifting Streets and San staff around, or possibly even reorganizing garbage pickup, so more labor is available for recycling collection. But the sources say top city officials are wary of upsetting aldermen, who they fear would resist any plan that lessens their control over everyday services. It would almost certainly make the blue cart program more economical—Chicago spends far more on the labor and equipment for its waste management systems than most municipalities. But my sources say top officials have balked because they're not sure it's worth a fight with organized labor or the political costs of defending another privatization deal in the City Council, which took a lot of heat for privatizing street parking last year. The blue cart program is already partially privatized, though. Currently city employees driving city trucks collect recycling every couple weeks, then take it to a city- owned facility whose operations have been outsourced to a private firm, Allied Waste. There materials are loaded onto trucks owned by another private company, Resource Management, and transported to its center in Chicago Ridge, where they're sorted by type of material and sold to other private companies that use the materials to manufacture other products. It even predates Mayor Daley's first term. It was 1. 98. 7 when Harold Washington first proposed enlisting private firms to pick up recyclables from homes served by city garbage crews. Washington died before implementing the plan, and in 1. Mayor Daley put the kibosh on it in favor of a four- ward pilot program that used Streets and San employees instead. Within a couple years he'd ditched that program for the blue bag program, conceived by connections at the private firm Waste Management. Not surprisingly, Waste Management was subsequently hired to fish the blue bags out of the trash, at a cost to taxpayers of tens of millions of dollars a year. Now Daley is circling back to Washington's original proposal. According to the study results released by the city this spring, just 1. About 6. 1 percent comes from the C & D sector, whose efforts are one of the city's few recycling success stories. The other 2. 5 percent comes from businesses and what the city refers to as high- density residential buildings—those with more than four units, for which garbage collection and recycling are already in the private sector. For the last 2. 0 years recycling in these buildings has been an even lower priority for the Daley administration. In 1. 99. 3 the City Council passed the Chicago High Density Residential and Commercial Source Reduction and Recycling Ordinance, better known as the Burke- Hansen ordinance, after the aldermen who sponsored it. It requires that building owners set up recycling for at least three kinds of materials. If they don't, the city can issue warnings, impose fines of $1. In practice, however, the ordinance is almost meaningless, because city officials quickly decided that they didn't want to alienate property owners and building managers by enforcing it. The city didn't inspect high- density or commercial buildings to see if they had recycling plans until 2. Most didn't, but even then the city didn't impose any penalties.
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