Recycling has more than doubled in the Chicago wards where suburban-style, curbside carts replaced the city’s unpopular blue bag program.
After more than a decade of defending Mayor Daley’s blue bag initiative despite widespread public indifference, city officials have been testing the blue carts at homes in seven wards over the past few months.
That approach has brought immediate and dramatic improvement, according to city and state documents obtained by the Tribune through the Freedom of Information Act.
In the 19th Ward on the Far Southwest Side, as much as 20 percent of the total waste from homes is now put into blue carts for recycling, including commodities such as paper, plastic, glass and metal cans. Under blue bag, only 7 percent of waste from the ward was diverted from landfills and recycled.
The records show the South Side’s 5th and 8th Wards together saw their recycling rate jump from 3 percent with blue bags to 7.7 percent with blue carts in April, only the first month of the pilot program. The blue-cart rate for those wards increased further to 9.3 percent by June.
And in the 1st Ward, the recycling rate rose to more than 13 percent from the blue bag level of 7.6 percent in the first few weeks after the carts were implemented in June, said Manuel Flores, alderman of the Near Northwest Side ward.
This month, the 46th and 47th Wards on the North Side became the latest wards to adopt the new system.
For now, though, blue bag remains the recycling system for homes in the city’s other 43 wards. A 2003 city study found that only 13 percent of homes used blue bags.
Many Chicagoans long have complained that the old system is cumbersome and expressed doubts that their efforts are worth the trouble. The blue bag approach requires homeowners to buy the bags from stores.
Once filled with recyclables, the bags are piled into the back of trucks with other waste and taken to plants where workers are supposed to separate them from garbage headed for landfills.
Critics say the bags often break during the process. And a 2005 Tribune investigation found that many loads of garbage laden with blue bags do not even go to the city’s dedicated recycling plants and instead are trucked straight to dumps.
Chicagoans who don’t live in a blue-cart ward but scorn blue bags have one other option. Since November, the city has operated 15 recycling drop-off centers.
While city records show that some of those centers are scarcely used, other drop-off bins are packed weekly. At the most successful of the new drop-off centers, at 6441 N. Ravenswood Ave., recyclers say they frequently have to leave bags on the ground because the bins often are jammed to capacity.
On a recent weekend afternoon, Mike Wszalek drove 15 minutes to the Ravenswood center and stuffed several bags of recyclables in an overflowing bin. A recent transplant from Phoenix, he said he didn’t know where to get blue bags and “wasn’t sure if it was actually going on still.”
“Moving here, it was hard on the conscience,” said Wszalek, 27. “My whole life, I’ve separated recycling.”
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The new way
Recycling advocates say the new system is more convenient to use than blue bags and they have faith the contents of the carts actually will be recycled. Under the pilot, the city picks up recyclables from the blue carts every other week and also collects bags of yard waste every week.
