The city recently announced two new recycling initiatives, a grant program and pilot program to test stickers-on-garbage-bags as an alternative to blue bags. The Chicago Recycling Coalition would like to commend the city for trying to be innovative but must criticize how they have gone about doing so. We have no complaints about the grant program, but the pilot program makes very little sense to us.
If you take bottles, cans, paper and other recyclables, put them in a bag, crush them in the back of a garbage truck, then take underpaid workers and ask them to sort through the garbage looking for those bags, you won’t get good recycling. The type of bag, its color, twist-tie or sticker won’t change that. This is the fundamental flaw of the blue-bag program and is the reason almost everyone around the United States and the world who recycles keeps recyclables separate from the garbage. In addition the part of our waste stream that the city has the worst record for recycling is our organic waste–our leaves, grass, etc. This pilot doesn’t do anything to change the problems associated with mixing those materials with garbage.
The Chicago Recycling Coalition has been participating in the city-sponsored Green Initiatives Subcommittee for Waste. There have been some good conversations about how to improve recycling in Chicago. It therefore came as a surprise to us when these two new programs were announced and no one on that committee was notified. This was not the spirit of cooperation that we thought the city was developing.
Mayor Richard M. Daley seems to take seriously his commitment to making Chicago the greenest city in America and has done a fine job in many areas. Recycling is not one of them, and the blue-bag program is an ongoing black mark on the city’s green agenda.
