Despite official assurances that a decline last year in the performance of Chicago’s blue-bag program was a short-term problem, more recent figures indicate residential recycling is mired in a deeper slump than the city has acknowledged.
In testimony before a City Council committee last month, Streets and Sanitation Commissioner Al Sanchez said that 22 percent of the city’s paper, cans, glass and other trash were diverted from landfills to be reused during the one-year period ending in June 2003. Just a few years before, the program had achieved the city’s target recycling rate of at least 25 percent.
In its report to aldermen, the Streets and Sanitation Department blamed the problem on changes in operation of the program in February 2003. “We see such a decline as temporary and normal,” the report stated, predicting a revival before the next annual report.
In reality, the blue-bag program continued to fall short of the city’s recycling goals during the second half of 2003 and the first five months of this year, according to city documents obtained by the Tribune.
Chicago recorded a residential recycling rate of 22.6 percent for the first five months of 2004, the public records show.
Aldermen harshly criticized Sanchez at last month’s hearing. “The decline is not temporary at all,” said Ald. Joe Moore (49th). “[Sanchez] definitely has some explaining to do.”
The “State of Recycling” report also disclosed that more than 20 percent of the garbage collected from homes is no longer trucked to giant sorting facilities built for $60 million by the city in the 1990s expressly for the blue-bag program. Officials say they do not know how much of the garbage that does not get sent to the sorting centers is recycled.
Chicago met its target residential recycling rate of at least 25 percent within three years of introducing the blue-bag method in 1995. But the numbers have declined in recent years.
Mayor Richard Daley defended the program last month. If “20 or 25 percent” of the city’s trash is diverted from landfills, the mayor said, that is “better than nothing.”
In a recent interview, Sanchez said Chicago’s recycling efforts are going well and will improve as the city more aggressively encourages residents to place recylables in blue garbage bags.
“You’ll see that number slowly move up,” Sanchez said of the 22 percent recycling rate. “That’s a great number for an industrial city.”
He said his department needs more time to refine the program. Streets and Sanitation assumed responsibility for overseeing the program from the city’s Environment Department early last year.
At about the same time, the city chose a new private contractor to operate the program, switching from Waste Management to Allied Waste Transportation.
Under a subcontract with Waste Management, a company linked to the politically connected Duff family made more than $74 million to sort recycling bags from garbage at Chicago’s sorting centers. Federal prosecutors allege that a trusted black associate of the Duffs, who are white, fraudulently claimed to be the company’s boss to win city work as part of a minority set-aside program.
Under Allied, politically connected firms continue to be heavily involved in the blue-bag program, records show.
Urban Services of America–one of the largest donors to the Hispanic Democratic Organization, the political group headed by former Daley aide Victor Reyes–will reap more than $18 million as an Allied subcontractor, records show.
Daley administration officials said Tuesday they have asked the city’s inspector general to investigate payments to another minority-owned firm with a similar name that were cashed by white-owned Urban Services.
For more than a year, the Daley administration has mailed more than $3 million in payments to the minority firm, Urban Systems Inc., which was hired even though city officials knew the sole owner of the firm was dead. Urban Systems was hired to supply the city with residential garbage carts.
Allied also pays Daley ally Fred Barbara $500,000 a year under one contract and a lump sum of $225,000 under the other for serving as “operations analyst.”
The inspector general recently alleged that Karen’s Kartage, a firm making almost $2 million as an Allied subcontractor, is run by Barbara even though the city had certified the company as a woman-owned firm.
Before the switch to Allied from Waste Management, all garbage collected by the city was taken to one of four sorting centers. Now more than 20 percent of the garbage that city trucks collect is taken to one of three transfer stations on the South Side rather than the sorting centers.
The transfer stations are “significantly less effective” than sorting centers at pulling recyclables from the waste stream, said Betsy Vandercook, president of the Chicago Recycling Coalition. The main purpose of transfer stations is to bundle waste before shipping it to landfills, she said.
But officials said it is cheaper to truck some garbage to the transfer stations.
One of the transfer stations is run by Shred-All Recycling Systems, which Barbara claimed to own in a 1997 interview with World Wastes, a trade publication.
In that interview, Barbara noted the he was not involved in the blue-bag program at the time. But he told World Wastes that he built a recycling center next to his transfer station because he expected the city’s recycling efforts to expand.
“There will be room for everybody,” Barbara said.
