Entries associated with the tag "Blue Carts":

It’s been clear to me for a while that people really do want to keep their garbage out of landfills. But I was still floored to find the bins overflowing the last two times I visited the city’s recycling drop-off site in my neighborhood (pictured). Other people aren’t just surprised and dismayed—they’re pissed.

North-sider Amy Lardner recently decided to e-mail a few suggestions to Streets and Sanitation commissioner Michael Picardi:

I've been frustrated by Chicago's lack of a valid, functional, city-wide, recycling program. Many of my acquaintances and friends are similarly dismayed by Chicago’s failure to show leadership in this area.

Tonight, any alderman or Streets and San official who wants proof Chicagoans want a working municipal recycling program need only go to the Lincoln Park Nature Museum's drop-off bin. The bin is heaped full and is overflowing. That so many people are making the time and special effort to drop off their recycling should surely prove something to the city's elected officials.

Until Chicago has a functional recycling program, I will continue to scorn any “green” designation the Mayor and city tout, and so will my friends.

Without recycling, Chicago's like Detroit. I lived there too. Twenty years ago--it's when I first started taking my recycling to a suburban drop-off bin, and here I am, living now in a city three times larger than Detroit, doing the same. Shame on Chicago.We need a functioning city-wide recycling program that works for all, from private to municipal haulers, and that means having a working program, enforcing it, and educating residents on how to use it.

Sincerely,

Amy Lardner

Amy heard back from one of the commissioner’s staffers (“We are currently working on a number of projects that should address this issue in the future”). After she challenged him for specifics, she got a response from Picardi himself (or someone who signed his name):

Dear Ms. Lardner:

Thank you for your letter and your support for recycling.

Chicago, in fact, is in the midst of a major evolution in recycling--which is a critical priority for Mayor Richard M. Daley. As the lead Department in the effort, Streets and Sanitation constantly seeks ways to improve how we recycle and to encourage a culture of recycling citywide.

Currently, we employ three basic recycling methods: the Blue Cart Program, Blue Bag and our 16 recycling drop-off centers across the city.

Blue Cart is single stream recycling. It has recently gone from field tests to a regional rollout. By 2011 it will be the main recycling mode for all of our residential customers.

Given the cost and logistics of shifting to such a large customer base, Blue Cart will not happen overnight. We believe that once it is in place, the system will offer Chicagoans the best and most up-to-date way to recycle.

The City provides waste collection to single family homes up to four flats. Buildings with private scavenger service cannot be provided with Blue Cart service. The Chicago High Density Residential and Commercial Source Reduction and Recycling Ordinance, however, requires all buildings that contract for private waste hauling to have a recycling program. This includes residential buildings more than four units, office buildings, restaurants and commercial establishments. This ordinance requires building owners or property managers (the person responsible for providing waste service) to provide a recycling program to tenants.  Furthermore, there must be an education program to ensure everyone is aware of the program.  It does not require building residents or tenants to use the program, but there must be the opportunity to recycle.

As Blue Cart expands, we will most likely look to strengthen the ordinance and require large residential buildings to have a system similar to Blue Cart.

Residents of areas that have yet to transition to Blue Cart may still use our expanded regional drop off centers. If they are not able to do this they may continue to use the Blue Bags until they are officially on Blue Cart. Any Blue Bags placed in the standard black garbage carts will be picked up. While we will no longer pay for mechanical sorting at sorting centers, operators of these centers or the transfer stations where all waste is taken are required by permit to pull these bags and recycle them. Since Blue Bags are used by customers of many private sector haulers who pick up trash and recyclables from high rise residents, they will continue to see Blue Bags at their facilities.

As I say, recycling in Chicago is evolving. We believe that within a few years recycling will be easy and wide spread and that the ideas contained within the culture of recycling will be deeply planted in people’s minds and lives. Again, thank you again for your interest. More information about the City's efforts can be found at www.cityofchicago.org.

Sincerely,

Michael J. Picardi
Commissioner Department of Streets and Sanitation

And no, I’m not Amy Lardner.

The Daley administration's Blue Bag recycling program was officially declared dead Friday morning. It was 17. 

City officials offered no lamentations for the program in announcing its demise at a press conference in Uptown. By the end of the summer, they said with pride, blue bags and other recyclable materials will no longer be sorted out of trash collected by city sanitation crews.

Instead, the city will resume its slow expansion of blue cart recycling, in which residents toss their recyclables into a container for separate pickup. An additional 92,000 households will have blue cart recycling by the end of the summer (see map), and all residential buildings with city garbage pickup--those with four or fewer units--will have blue cart recycling by 2011. Areas that already have blue carts have recycled at about triple the rate they did with blue bags.

The city will also begin adding more sites where residents without the service can drop off materials for recycling. 

"This is a day to celebrate," said Suzanne Malec-McKenna, commissioner for the Chicago Department of Environment. "We have accomplished much, but we also understand we have a lot of work to do. Our programs and initiatives have earned praise from many in the environmental arena, but the one consistent area of concern has always been recycling." 

Streets and Sanitation commissioner Michael Picardi said the blue cart rollout can't go any faster because the city doesn't have the money for all the new carts, trucks, and employees needed. And it doesn't have the means to handle the logistics that quickly. "It took us five years to roll out the black cart [garbage pickup] program," he said. "It takes ten months to order a truck. We pick up from 600,000 city residential households. It would be impossible to roll this out to all of them in a year."

But the city isn't going to wait until 2011 to kill off what's left of the Blue Bag program. It wants the money it's currently spending on it to put toward the Blue Cart program. And environment officials want to be able to focus their recycling education efforts on the newer approach.

First introduced by Mayor Daley in 1990 as "extremely convenient, environmentally sound, and the least expensive method to administer," the Blue Bag program instead cost Chicago taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars while keeping just a fraction of the city's recyclable waste out of landfills. It has been widely blamed for dimming Chicagoans' confidence in recycling generally, even though environmentalists say recycling is one of the simplest ways the average household can help fight climate change and protect natural resources.

Even at the event that amounted to the Blue Bag program's wake, city officials were defending the decision to stick with it so long. "That was the state of the art at the time," Picardi said. "This is state of the art now."

But recycling experts never thought it was a sound approach. "If by 'state of the art' you mean new and unproven and unused by just about anyone else in the country, then yes, it was," said one environmentalist at the event Friday. 

Among the Blue Bag program's fiercest critics were the leaders of the Chicago Recycling Coalition, some of whom were on hand to announce their support for the conversion to blue carts. "The CRC has fought for this change for 16 years," said Julie Dick, vice president of the group's board. "Today marks the end of a long, hard battle. There are so many other waste management issues to be addressed in this city, and we are really excited that we finally get to move on to those issues. The Blue Bag program has been a huge distraction."

Dick called for other waste-reduction strategies and a citywide program to bring recycling to the thousands of residential buildings with private garbage haulers, which aren't eligible for the Blue Cart program. "We're looking forward to the day when every building in Chicago has an effective, source-separated recycling program."

The Blue Bag program is survived by its parents, Mayor Daley and garbage giant Waste Management; its stepmother, current program manager Allied Waste (PDF); and dozens of longtime aldermen who publicly supported the program for years. One longtime defender, former Streets and San commissioner Al Sanchez, was bagged himself in 2005.

Sometime in the next few days the city will announce that it's expanding its popular but limited blue cart recycling program to swaths of the north lakefront, according to aldermen and other recycling advocates.

Over the past few days, two aldermen--Tom Tunney of the 44th Ward and Scott Waguespack of the 32nd--have been telling constituents that the program will be available to many of them beginning at the end of May. 

In the oddly shaped 32nd Ward, the easy, single-stream recycling service will be offered to "low-density" residences--those with four or fewer units--north of Belmont, according to a newsletter Waguespack's office sent out a few days ago. It says he's still trying to bring service as far south as Diversey. Tunney announced earlier this week in his own newsletter that all low-density homes in his ward would be included in the expansion.

Aldermen from across the city say their constituents have been clamoring for blue cart service, which has proven to be far more effective at diverting waste from landfills and inspiring participation than the city's blue bag program. Last fall the Department of Streets and Sanitation, which is in charge of city recycling, was preparing to expand the blue cart service to most of the neighborhoods along north and south lakefronts, but the plan was killed during budget negotiations between Mayor Daley and aldermen reluctant to sign off on tens of millions of dollars in property tax hikes, most of which were passed anyway.

Since then the department has been vague about if and when it would try to resuscitate its plan. Late last fall about 3,000 new households in the 40th and 48th wards received blue carts even though those areas weren't included in official announcements about the program--officials quietly said providing the service there was cost-effective because these homes were near the 46th and 47th wards, which were included in the program last year.

And Tuesday Streets and San spokesman Matt Smith refused to provide any details about the announcements made by Waguespack and Tunney. "Until we're ready to come forward with it we're not going to say anything publicly. We have to get our ducks in a row," Smith said. "But that certainly would be a goal, to expand in the future."

Some sources say the city is worried that budget pressures will force it to revoke its plans again. In particular, officials are worried the city won't get funding help it needs from the state, which has been erratic about making payments and releasing grants.

That apparently hasn't stopped them from scheduling public educational meetings in the 44th Ward. According to Tunney's newsletter, city officials will discuss how the program works at 7 PM on Thursday, May 8, at Agassiz School (2851 N. Seminary) and on Monday, May 19, at Sheil Park (3505 N. Southport).

City officials have distributed a map to aldermen showing that they're planning to expand the Blue Cart recycling program to most of the north side and a good chunk of the south side between this December and the end of 2008.

If the plan is approved when the City Council votes on the 2008 budget ordinance Wednesday, the city's source-separated recycling program, in which residents served by city garbage crews place all of their recyclables into blue containers in the alley, will be extended to an 131,000 additional households on top of the 81,000 already included. That would mean that about 30 percent of the 700,000 residences with city garbage service--all Chicago dwellings with four or fewer units, known as low-density residences--will be covered by the program.

City officials say they want to organize this expansion around convenience and geography rather than ward boundaries. Previously the city has rolled the program out ward by ward; currently, all low-density residences in the 1st, 5th, 8th, 19th, 37th, 46th, and 47th Wards have the source-separated recycling service. Under the new plan ward boundaries would be ignored. All the low-density residences from Cicero Avenue east to the lake, and from Diversey north to the city limits, would be included. The service would also be offered to all the low-density homes between 55th and about 103rd, from State Street east to the lake. An area west of State from 55th to 75th would also be included, as would one south to 115th Street between State and Stony Island.

This would mean that all low-density dwellings in the 7th, 20th, 39th, 40th, 48th, 49th, and 50th wards would have blue cart service, along with portions of the 6th, 9th, 10th, 16th, 17th, 30th, 31st, 32nd, 35th, 44th, and 45th Wards. 

Since the new recycling program uses its own trucks and personnel, city officials say, it doesn't have to run in tandem with garbage pickup, which is coordinated by Streets and Sanitation ward superintendents. Besides offering more efficiency, the new organization plan may satisfy--at least temporarily--a greater number of aldermen, many of whom have been getting the business from constituents demanding better recycling services. 

The Chicago Recycling Coalition and other advocates have praised the Blue Cart pilot for yielding far higher resident participation and keeping about twice as much trash out of landfills as the city's Blue Bag program. But they've also been critical of the slow rollout pace, saying it's clear that source-separated recycling is far more effective than any other method. Some analysts believe the city is spending too much money and confusing residents by offering different recycling programs in different areas.

But city officials say they're limited by the up-front investment costs needed to take blue carts citywide. The proposed 2008 budget would set funds to purchase more than 20 new trucks to collect recyclables, at more than $150,000 apiece, and $7.9 million to cover 111 recycling-related jobs. 

None of this will directly help the thousands of people who live in large apartment buildings and condos--unless they're planning to sneak over to drop their recyclables into a neighbor's blue cart [scroll down to read PK's comment at the bottom].

Not that this is legal.

After years of dismal recycling rates in Chicago, city officials now say they want to toughen Chicago's recycling laws to ensure that residents of all apartment buildings and condos have recycling programs--and that they actually work.

The city just began offering curbside recycling to single-family homes and residential buildings with four or fewer units in the North Side's 46th and 47th wards. This means 7 of the city's 50 wards now have ditched the low-performing Blue Bag program in favor of the Blue Cart pilot. In the new program, residents in homes and "low-density" apartments and condos put all of their recyclable commodities--paper, glass, plastic, and metal--into a single blue cart (which they literally place at the curb in some areas, and in the alleys next to their trash bins in others). City crews pick up the materials every two weeks and take them to a high-tech sorting center in south suburban Chicago Ridge. The materials are separated and then shipped off to manufacturers for reuse.

So far, according to city officials, recycling rates are nearly two times higher among Blue Cart residences than they had been under the Blue Bag program. But the city is going to have to keep up an aggressive education and promotion effort, because rates are lagging behind the city's goals in predominantly black and less affluent wards like the Fifth and Eighth. "Out of the box, our goal is 25 percent," Chris Sauve, recycling coordinator for the Department of Streets and Sanitation, said in a meeting last night for 46th Ward residents. "But we shall see." 

Of course, the single-family homes and smaller apartment and condo buildings served by Streets and San crews only account for about a fourth of Chicago's garbage. More than half of the remaining 75 percent comes from residential buildings with five or more units, whose contracts with private waste haulers rarely include effective recycling programs.

Under city law, the owners and managers of these buildings are required to offer at least modest recycling services, but the ordinance has only been enforced haphazardly. Sauve said the city wants to amend the law to require that private waste haulers and property managers offer single-stream recycling--that is, a system in which you drop your paper, plastic, glass, and metal into a single bin that's separated at a sorting center down the road. Right now, he said, the city is conducting what amounts to a pilot within a pilot in the 46th Ward by talking with waste companies, building managers, and residents to see what's already working in high-density buildings and what isn't.

"We need to understand from management companies and condo associations how to do this and what obstacles they might have," Sauve said.

Recycling advocates have called for action in the high-density residential sector for years. Still, the law could be rewritten to say that nonrecyclers will face the death penalty--and it wouldn't matter unless somebody's going to enforce it.