Despite failing to meet requirements for recycling the city’s household garbage, a politically connected company will continue to run Mayor Richard Daley’s blue bag program for another two years.
City officials also said Monday they have agreed to let Allied Waste Transportation send thousands of tons of waste to an Indiana landfill but count it as recycling. The decision drew criticism from environmental activists, but it would allow City Hall and Allied again to boost the percentage of household garbage that it claims to recycle.
For months, Allied has fallen far short of the city’s requirement to divert at least 25 percent of household garbage from landfills. But the contracts between the city and Allied do not call for any penalties for failing to meet that standard.
The contract extension comes as the city explores alternatives to the controversial blue bag program, which asks residents to place recyclables in blue bags that are piled together with other waste in garbage trucks.
For more than a decade, blue bag recycling has been one of Daley’s most cherished environmental initiatives. But the city in April began a pilot program in the Beverly neighborhood that ditches blue bags and instead collects recyclables separately from other garbage, as is the practice in the suburbs and most other cities.
Asked whether the extended deal with Allied meant that Chicago planned to maintain its long-standing approach to recycling, Daley spokesman Lance Lewis replied: “I really don’t know what this means for the blue bag program.”
Allied has become a major political player in Chicago in recent years. The firm and its blue bag subcontractors are important campaign donors to the pro-Daley Hispanic Democratic Organization, which federal prosecutors recently described as part of an illegal patronage-hiring scheme at City Hall.
Daniel Katalinic, a retired city official who was indicted last month in the hiring investigation, worked as a lobbyist for Allied. Longtime Daley friend Fred Barbara is projected to make more than $1.7 million as a consultant for Allied under the blue bag deal.
Allied’s close ties to the Daley administration were further underscored Monday by the company’s announcement of the contract extension–in a news release sent to reporters from the firm of Greg Goldner, campaign manager for Daley’s 2003 re-election effort.
Allied won a three-year, $128 million deal to run the blue bag program in early 2003. The city exercised its option to extend the agreements until February 2008, but officials did not release the financial terms of the extension Monday.
Under the blue bag program, relatively few residents use the bags. Most of the city’s recycling is done at Allied-operated sorting centers, where workers and machines pull recylables from truckloads of garbage.
Recycling of commodities such as glass, paper and plastic has declined markedly since Allied took over the program, because almost a third of the garbage collected from homes in Chicago bypasses the sorting centers and goes directly to dumps.
Besides recyclables, the sorting centers yield a stew of grass clippings and other yard waste mixed with pencils, pens, straws, fragments of glass and other rubbish. The city used to send tens of thousands of tons of this material, known as screened yard waste, to a farm in Indiana each year, claiming it as recycled.
Indiana authorities shut down the operation in March after the Tribune reported that the farm took in much more screened waste than the state permitted. The city’s recycling rate was cut roughly in half.
Now Allied officials say they will compost the screened waste in a landfill in Fulton County, Ind., and use it to cover mounds of garbage. City officials agreed to let this plan count as recycling in an Aug. 30 decision by Daley’s then-interim chief procurement officer, Mary Dempsey, who consulted with Environment Commissioner Sadhu Johnston.
Environmental activists, who have long opposed the blue bag program, said they are glad screened waste is going to a landfill rather than being spread on farmland. But they scorned the notion that the new plan represents progress, because the goal of recycling is to divert waste from landfills.
“Once again, the city is looking for ways of meeting its recycling goals through fake diversion,” said Betsy Vandercook, president of the Chicago Recycling Coalition.
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lcohen@tribune.com
dmihalopoulos@tribune.com
