[From the Chicago Tribune on April 05, 2012 by John Byrne]

Source: Recycling in Chicago on Chicago Tonight (WTTW)

The decision to sign yet another blue cart contract with Chicago United Industries sets the stage for the Oct. 3 start of a “managed competition” between city crews and private contractors to determine who can provide the best service at the lowest possible cost.

Under a contract that expired in June, Chicago United Industries supplied blue carts to the city at a cost of $45-per-container. At that rate, the new contract would cover 555,555 blue carts — enough to expand the program to 359,000 households without recycling and pay for 196,555 replacement carts.

Determined to transform Chicago from, what he calls a “tale of two cities” when it comes to recycling, Emanuel is privatizing four of six service areas and allowing city employees to compete in the other two.

Within four months, the mayor has promised blue-cart recycling will come to 20,000 additional households in Wicker Park, Bucktown and Logan Square.

Six months into the competition, a cost-benefit analysis will determine how city employees measured up against two private contractors: Waste Management and Midwest Metal Management.

The Chicago Sun-Times reported last summer that thousands of blue recycling carts — with a pricetag of nearly $1 million — are stashed away in a warehouse at 900 E. 103rd Street because City Hall bought them to make the citywide switch to suburban-style recycling, but ran out of money one-third of the way through.

At the time, the Daley administration acknowledged having a stockpile of “roughly 22,000” carts. Streets and Sanitation employees who eyeballed the stash insisted the actual number was greater with carts piled 15-high and 25-deep for at least a block.

Streets and San spokesman Matt Smith refused to reveal the size of the existing stockpile.

Smith would only say that the inventory has dwindled somewhat over the last year as replacement carts were delivered to some of the 241,000 households currently served by blue-cart recycling. The contracts with Waste Management and Midwest Metal Management require the city to continue to supply blue carts picked up by private contractors.

“This is a smart tactical move that will allow us the flexibility to meet our blue cart needs, whatever those might be in the future,” Smith said, stressing that the $25 million figure was only a “ceiling” and that the city would pay for the carts it needs.

“We have an existing blue cart service … that needs to be maintained and the possibility of future expansion as we improve the efficiency of our operations. Also, we are in the process of introducing competitive bidding. … Because of all these factors, it makes perfect sense to have a contract in place.”

Lou Phillips, business manager of Laborers Union Local 1001, said he’s not surprised that City Hall is buying more blue carts.

“If they’re ordering the carts, that means they have plans to expand throughout the city. It shows they’re gung-ho to get it done,” Phillips said.

Noting that the union will be routing its own trucks, Phillips said, “I’m excited about the competition. I’m convinced we’re gonna win this. We’re gonna keep all that revenue [from the sale of recyclables] and run it more efficiently than it’s ever been run before.”

Chicago United Industries was banned by the city for allegedly acting as an illegal broker, only to be reinstated after filing a lawsuit against the city for taking the action without a hearing. The blue cart contract was supposed to expire in December, 2008, but was extended for two years without competitive bidding.

[From the Chicago Sun-Times on Sept 1st, 2011 by Fran Spielman]

City Hall chose Waste Management and Midwest Metal Management. The two companies have placed bids for the program totaling $6.6 million, compared to the $13.8 million the city currently pays for the 240,000 homes receiving curbside recycling service. If they prove to be more efficient collectors of recyclers than city employees, privatizing the entire blue cart program could save the city $6.2 million.

The trial rollout, starting in September, will expand curbside recycling to 20,000 homes in Wicker Park, Logan Square and Bucktown. If Waste Management and Midwest Metal Management prove to do an efficient job with recycling, then they’ll take over the entire program, with Laborers and Teamsters moving over to jobs collecting garbage.

Announcing the trial this morning, Emanuel said, “When it’s comes to recycling, Chicago has been a tale of two cities. Half the city has had recycling. Half has not had recycling. I want to change that. But, to do that, we have to be price-competitive. My job is to make sure that we’re delivering services to the entire city — not parts of the city — and do it in the most cost-effective way for city taxpayers.”

The move comes as City Hall and labor unions are already feeling each other out over Emanuel’s proposed work-rule changes and his sending out layoff notices to 625 unionized city workers. The mayor didn’t seemed fazed.

“I have an obligation to the city taxpayers — not to the city payroll,” he said.

[Originally posted July 18th 2011 on Chicagoist by Chuck Sudo]

Lou Phillips, business manager of Laborers Local 1001, said the city would be divided into six zones, with four of them awarded to the waste-hauling giant.

Brackenbox, supplier of giant Dumpsters known as “roll-off boxes” used to replace Hired Trucks, is expected to get at least one zone, he said.

Although a city official said the contracts were still being evaluated, Phillips said he has been told that Mayor Daley intends to sign the recycling contracts early next month to get ahead of a union-backed ordinance designed to keep the work in-house. It would require a two-thirds vote by the City Council before assets are sold and city services are privatized.

“They don’t have money to pay my members overtime or holidays, but they can bring companies in to do recycling. It’s a kick in the ass to the people of Chicago and to my members. These are the guys who stood up and took comp time and furlough days. Now they’re giving our work away,” Phillips said.

“Maybe it’s one last sweetheart deal. But the citizens will be left holding the bag. You won’t have a city work force anymore. Eventually, you’ll have a 1-800 number to call for your problems. It could lead to fees. This contract will start out costing $600,000 a month. I don’t see the city being able to absorb the cost.”

Phillips has been lobbying aldermen to impose a $10 monthly fee for recycling pickups to raise $72 million — enough to bankroll the citywide switch to curbside recycling now stuck at 241,000 households.

“A $10 user fee is gonna be cheap two years from now. Once these companies have got it for 10 years” the sky’s the limit.

Streets and Sanitation spokesman Matt Smith said Wednesday he had “no information” on the recycling contracts.

But Procurement Services spokeswoman Shannon Andrews said a Jan. 12 bid opening attracted eight proposals that were still being reviewed.

“This contract has not been awarded and the bids are still under evaluation,’’ Andrews said Wednesday.

The Laborers contract requires the city to inform the union when it intends to privatize the jobs of its members. The union is then given one last chance to submit a competing bid, now scheduled for April 6.

But Phillips charged Wednesday that the city is just going through the motions. Last summer, aldermen from across the city demanded to know why curbside recycling has come to only one-third of Chicago households.

A few weeks later, the Chicago Sun-Times reported that at least 22,000 blue recycling carts — with a pricetag of $1 million — were stashed away in a Far South Side warehouse because City Hall bought them to make the citywide switch but ran out of money one-third of the way through.

[Originally posted by Fran Spielman on The Chicago Sun Times]

Favoring a greener environment is like favoring school reform: it’s a lot easier to say you’re for it than to bring it about.

In January a coalition of environmental and civic groups developed a “Green Growth Platform”—20 steps for the next mayor to take to make Chicago greener. The steps include increasing funding for the CTA, reducing traffic congestion, improving the energy efficiency of city buildings, and supporting bicyclists, pedestrians, and locally grown food.

The mayoral candidates were asked if they were on board. All six answered “yes” to almost every step.

So who’s greenest? To seek an answer, it’s necessary to look closely at the candidates’ responses to the Green Growth Platform, and at their records too. Miguel del Valle, Rahm Emanuel, and Gery Chico elaborated on most of their responses to the questionnaire circulated by the coalition—17 groups including the Active Transportation Alliance, the Environmental Law & Policy Center, the Sierra Club, and Environment Illinois. But while Emanuel and Chico tended to reiterate the concerns of environmentalists without offering concrete proposals or promises, del Valle gave longer and more specific answers, often citing studies and statistics and going into detail on how he’d fund and carry out his proposals. Patricia Watkins and William “Dock” Walls offered a few brief comments, and Carol Moseley Braun didn’t comment at all beyond indicating her support for every issue.

Del Valle also found time to discuss his positions with the Reader. Spokespersons for Emanuel and Chico said their candidates weren’t available, and Braun’s office didn’t respond to interview requests.

CLIMATE AND ENERGY

The Fisk and Crawford coal-powered plants emit five million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year, as well as sulfur dioxide and particulate matter, into the Latino-immigrant neighborhoods of Pilsen and Little Village. Del Valle joined environmental groups at a press conference last summer in support of the proposed Chicago Clean Power Ordinance, which would force the plants to shut down or convert to natural gas. Chico, who frequently invokes his childhood in the Back of the Yards neighborhood not far from one of the coal plants, said he supports the ordinance. Emanuel didn’t go that far, but he pledged to work closely with state and federal regulators and the City Council to make sure that Midwest Generation, which owns the plants, cleans them up “either by installing the necessary infrastructure to dramatically reduce the pollution they emit, or by converting to natural gas or another clean fuel.”

Local and national environmental groups have called on Emanuel to explicitly back the ordinance. “Chicago residents need to know whether he stands with the people in protecting the public health or with polluters like Midwest Generation,” said Edyta Sitko, a Greenpeace field organizer based in Chicago.

Emanuel has been criticized for his stance on climate change and carbon reduction while he was in the White House. Environmentalists accuse him of discouraging President Obama from pursuing an aggressive energy or climate bill that would put a “price” on carbon emissions and force companies to greatly scale them back. He reportedly advised Obama not to bring up climate change when commenting on the BP oil spill. In a commentary published last summer on grist.org, Eric Pooley, author of the 2010 book The Climate War, called Emanuel “an obstacle to climate action.” Pooley quoted an unnamed cabinet member as saying, “You had this incredible green cabinet of really committed people, but the only thing that really matters is what the president says—so everyone was trying to get words [about carbon limits] into his mouth. And Rahm was trying to keep the words out of his mouth.”

Along with closing or cleaning up the coal plants, environmental and planning groups say the new mayor must back the creation of new local renewable energy sources. The candidates all agree that the city and affiliated agencies should buy at least 20 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2014, and all but del Valle agreed to require all new and substantially rehabbed buildings to be wired to accommodate on-site renewable energy, such as rooftop solar panels, by 2014 (though not necessarily to produce such energy). Del Valle said he supported the concept but not the mandate. Green advocates say the new mayor will need to address not only where Chicago’s power comes from but how it’s distributed, because a “smarter” grid would reduce both electricity use and the risk of power outages.

Henry Henderson, who in the 1990s was Chicago’s first commissioner of the Department of Environment, is today midwest director of the Natural Resources Defense Council. He observes that changing the electric grid and the sources of the city’s power will require the mayor to negotiate with the state legislature, the Illinois Commerce Commission, the utility companies, and the Illinois Power Agency—and also seek input from the city’s business interests. All these bodies have a say in how power is priced and distributed in Chicago, and serious reform of the city’s energy sector will require much greater political skills from a mayor than the mere ability to ram an ordinance through the City Council.

TRANSPORTATION

Replying to the questionnaire, all the candidates said they’d try to make Chicago a hub of high-speed rail. All said they’d lobby for federal and state funds to expand Chicago Transit Authority service. All would demand pollution controls on CTA buses. Del Valle pledged to advocate for more equitable state funding of Chicago, suburban, and downstate public-transit programs. “The Chicago area currently gets 45% and downstate gets 55% of state transportation funds even though the Chicago region represents 70% of the state’s population and 78% of the state’s economy,” he wrote.

Biking advocates have lauded Emanuel’s detailed plans that include 25 miles of new bike lanes each year during his first term and the completion of the $75 million, 2.65-mile elevated Bloomingdale Trail on the north side. As Obama’s chief of staff, Emanuel was a major backer of high-speed rail. He’s released a detailed plan for easing road traffic congestion here and has touted his support for the CREATE program, a public-private partnership aimed at reducing congestion on the freight lines through Chicago. When freight trains are stalled waiting to get through the city—sometimes for days—residents are exposed to significantly more dangerous diesel emissions.

WATER

As a congressman, Emanuel was known by Great Lakes advocacy groups as an aggressive leader on environmental issues affecting the lakes. On the questionnaire he said he supported both disinfecting the city’s wastewater, which makes up most of the Chicago River’s flow, and expediting the ongoing Army Corps of Engineers study on separating the Chicago River system from the Mississippi River to prevent the advance of invasive Asian carp. But he offered no specific proposals, and he didn’t address either the infrastructure implications—re-reversing the Chicago River could cut off Chicago-area canals from Lake Michigan—or the significant funding needed to make either change.

All the candidates said they’d enforce the existing codes limiting storm water runoff. But fully addressing Chicago’s flooding problems isn’t easy. Runoff could be reduced by infrastructure improvements such as permeable pavement, green rooftops, bioswales, and rain barrels. But installing permeable pavement on a large scale would be expensive, and sidewalks, parking lots, and streets would have to be torn up. On the questionnaire, only two candidates elaborated at all on their views on runoff, with del Valle saying he’d make managing storm water “a priority” and Emanuel saying he’d order a “multi-year plan.”

FOOD AND TRASH

All the candidates said they’d support locally grown food. Del Valle said he’s a big proponent of hydroponics and urban agriculture—using vacant lots and public land to grow produce in low-income communities—and thinks the city should move more quickly to change zoning laws and otherwise support urban agriculture.

The questionnaire also asked the candidates if they’d make source-separated recycling available to all homes and businesses by 2014. Emanuel and del Valle said they’re for it but wouldn’t commit to a 2014 deadline. Del Valle added, “If we’re going to commit to recycling, we’re going to have to consider how to pay for it,” and he said the funds might have to come from charging fees and partially privatizing the service. However, he promised to do that “the opposite of how the parking-meter deal was handled.”

[Originally posted on the Chicago Reader]

The 2011 budget for Chicago’s Bureau of Sanitation, the division of the Department of Streets and Sanitation responsible for picking up and disposing of trash and recyclables, is about $141 million. The city expects to collect about 975,000 tons of garbage and recyclables this year, which is about $145 a ton. By contrast, Los Angeles and Houston, the cities closest in size to Chicago, spend $133 and $94 a ton, respectively.

In Philadelphia, an old, densely-populated city where landfill space is more scarce and expensive, the cost is about $110 a ton.

When costs like employee benefits, worker’s compensation, and administrative expenses are factored in, the true cost of picking up and disposing of garbage in Chicago is more than $200 a ton. Critics contend that much of the higher cost is driven by the city’s current ward-by-ward system of garbage collection.

On Friday, in response to questions from the Chicago News Cooperative, a spokesman for the Department of Streets and Sanitation said that the city would begin converting parts of the city to a more efficient grid-based collection system this spring. A small grid-based pilot program has been underway since last year. “We believe expanding this effort to the whole city becomes even more important as ward boundaries are set to change later in the year,” said the spokesman, Matt Smith, referring to an upcoming ward remap. “Re-configuring routes based on a grid instead of new ward boundaries just makes sense.”

With city spending outstripping revenue by hundreds of millions of dollars every year, the candidates in the Feb. 22 mayoral election are eyeing the city’s deluxe garbage collection system as perhaps the single largest opportunity to save taxpayer dollars.

The garbage collection system is “ripe for reform,” according to a position paper issued by the campaign of Rahm Emanuel. He has raised the prospect of privatizing what has long been done by legions of city workers.

As one of the most important and expensive services that the city provides, the cost of trash pickup has become a key point of conflict between City Hall’s large unionized work force and city administrators seeking to balance the budget. Mr. Daley has resisted much change during his 22-year tenure, emphasizing that the current system gets the job done.

The city devotes more manpower to collecting garbage than any other major American city. Most of Chicago’s garbage crews are manned by three well-paid workers: a Teamster behind the wheel, a laborer sitting shotgun and a second laborer who holds on at the back of the truck.

No other large city except Philadelphia has three workers in a crew. Most other cities and Chicago suburbs gather the garbage with only one employee per truck. New York reduced crew sizes to two more than 30 years ago.

And no other big city but Chicago collects trash by irregularly shaped legislative districts. Aldermen have long defended the city’s ward-by-ward approach as good customer service, but the inspector general’s office estimates that using the sort of grid pickup system employed by other cities would save Chicago more than $30 million a year.

Of the four mayoral candidates who responded to questionnaires from The Chicago News Cooperative, only Patricia Van Pelt Watkins said she would support reducing the number of workers in each garbage crew. But all four of those candidates — Mr. Emanuel and Ms. Watkins, as well as Gery Chico and Miguel del Valle — said they were open to establishing a grid collection system. (Two candidates, Carol Moseley Braun and William (Dock) Walls, did not return completed questionnaires.)

The first matter of debate is the exact cost for the city’s trash pickup efforts. Although former aides to Mr. Daley said the administration had conducted cost-efficiency analyses for garbage pickup, a spokesman for the city’s budget office said he could not locate those studies. Streets and Sanitation officials said it would be “unduly burdensome” to produce any such documents.

The city’s 2011 budget allocated more than $141 million for the Streets and Sanitation Department’s Bureau of Sanitation, which uses about 350 trucks to collect garbage from all residential buildings with four units or fewer. That means the per-ton cost is higher than in any of the other six largest cities except New York, where the expense of carting and dumping garbage in landfills is much higher than here.

And an analysis of the Chicago budget for this year found that the real cost of garbage pickup is significantly higher. The sanitation bureau’s allocation does not include expenses like disability payments for workers injured on the job, health care and pension benefits and pickups from public waste bins on sidewalks.

Including those expenses, the true bill for trash collection rises to about $204 million in a total operating budget of $6.2 billion, the analysis found. Some experts say the cost could be cut to as little as $130 a ton. Mr. Emanuel’s aides estimate that the city could save $40 million to $65 million. If city workers cannot reduce costs, Mr. Emanuel would create a “managed competition” between city workers and private bidders for the work.

Such an approach does not necessarily result in privatization. In Houston, the city government entered into a contract with a private company to collect garbage in part of the city, but the sanitation department later bid lower than private garbage haulers and won the work back.

But the specter of private garbage collection has infuriated many city garbage workers. Although the Teamsters endorsed Mr. Emanuel, the laborers’ union is siding with Mr. Chico, a former top aide to Mayor Daley, and they are distributing buttons that read, “I vote no to privatization.”

In defending crew size, laborers say that service would suffer because the job is very difficult, particularly during something like the recent blizzard.

In the 10-year contracts signed in 2007, Mr. Daley promised laborers and many other blue-collar city workers annual raises long after his last term ends in May. The laborers, who are paid about $63,000 a year, are promised a 3.25 percent wage increase this year and a 3.5 percent raise in 2012.

The city’s budget crunch has meant that the administration could not continue to keep its promises to employees. The laborers have already taken as many as 24 unpaid days off a year — in effect, a 9 percent pay cut — to help balance the budget and avert layoffs.

Two days after the recent storm, Curtis Strong and Janet Arrington, both 46-year-old laborers, dragged garbage carts through four-foot drifts in an unplowed alley on the near West Side. They were among almost 600 laborers who not only resumed picking up garbage two days after the storm but also shoveled bus stops and areas around fire hydrants.

Ms. Arrington, who has worked as a city sanitation laborer for 15 years, worked previously as a minimum-wage security guard.

Mr. Strong said the job was hazardous. He recently missed two weeks of work after he hurt his arm pulling a cart filled with heavy debris. He said having only one laborer on a crew is more dangerous than two.

“The way we work, we should be getting paid some money,” he said. “We have got families to feed, bills to pay.”

[Originally posted by Bonnie Trafelet on the Chicago News Cooperative]

Laborers Union Local 1001 suggests imposing a monthly recycling fee of $10 on 600,000 Chicago households with city garbage pickups.

Laborers Union Local 1001 is lobbying Chicago aldermen to impose a $10 monthly fee for recycling pickups to raise $72 million — enough to bankroll the citywide switch to curbside recycling.

Mayor Daley wants to privatize curbside recycling and an array of government staples that include Taste of Chicago to help erase a record $654.7 million shortfall without raising taxes or fees.

But, the lame-duck mayor has acknowledged the savings generated by a private recycling contractor would not be enough to expand recycling beyond the 241,000 households that already have the service.

That leaves still 359,000 households in the lurch. Their only recourse is to bring their recyclables to drop-off boxes, an inconvenience many homeowners are not prepared to endure.

Lou Phillips, business manager of Laborers Local 1001, has what he calls a “better idea” that would save union jobs: a $10 monthly recycling fee to impose on the 600,000 households with city garbage pickups.

“If they go to a private scavenger that saves 10 percent, aldermen will still have 50 percent of their constituents mad at them because they can’t recycle,” Phillips said.

“People pay all over for garbage collection and recycling. Arlington Heights has a fee that just went up 3.5 percent. It’s something the city has never done before, but something the city has to look at.”

In June, aldermen from across the city demanded to know why curbside recycling has come to only one-third of Chicago households. Ald. Tom Allen (38th) led the charge by introducing an “order” that would have established a Sept. 1 deadline for the expansion.

A few weeks later, the Sun-Times reported that at least 22,000 blue recycling carts — with a price tag of $1 million — were stashed away in a Far South Side warehouse because City Hall bought them to make the citywide switch, but ran out of money one-third of the way through.

On Monday, Allen refused to “open or close the door” on a $10-a-month user fee.

“We need to test the waters to see whether people feel strongly enough about participating in recycling that they’d be willing to pay a monthly fee,” Allen said.

“I know how strongly they feel about having unequal services. But whether they’re all ga-ga over recycle to the extent they’ll pay a separate fee, I don’t know. I wouldn’t open or close the door. That’s something that bears discussing.”

Mike Nowak, president of the Chicago Recycling Coalition, said a $10 monthly recycling fee is not “unreasonable,” noting that “a lot of cities” impose similar charges.

But Nowak questioned whether aldermen gearing up to face an angry electorate would be willing to ask their constituents to cough up $120 more a year.

“People are gonna think that’s a lot of money. I don’t see how this could get through at this point….It’s gonna be a very difficult thing to pass,” he said.

Still, Nowak said, “I’m glad somebody’s proposing something so there will be a debate on this. Whoever is running for mayor will have to address this issue.”

Phillips also is urging aldermen to establish a pilot program that would allow his members to compete with private scavenger services that pick up garbage at small businesses.

He argued that city crews could make the pickups for half the cost, particularly if newly hired employees are paid “break-in” rates.

[Originally posted by Fran Spielman on Sept 21st 2010 on The Chicago Sun Times]

He also managed multiple efforts to overhaul the city’s recycling system with little success (as this Chicago Reader feature from July recounts). The system at present does not provide equal services to all citizens and is rumored to be changing yet again in light of its expense and the city’s budget deficit. Developing an effective recycling strategy will be part of the legacy of a future mayor, not Richard M. Daley. If Chicago finally treats its wastewater like every other major city in the country does, that too will come under a future mayor.

That said, evidence that environmental quality ranks among Mayor Daley’s strongest achievements comes from his critics. Developing Government Accountability to the People, a coalition of community activist groups, gave Chicago’s government harsh grades in its recent evaluation of criminal justice, economic development, education, and ethics. It gave a mediocre grade for transportation and its best grade for environment. The summary of environmental accomplishments in the recent past was relatively favorable:

Chicago continues to show remarkable vision on many environmental issues. As a regional leader in committing to green technologies, Chicago has consistently looked toward both existing and emerging technologies to improve the environmental efficiency of its own operations, setting the example for residents and businesses. The city’s foresight in championing sustainable development has driven the growth of a new local industry. Further encouragement has been gleaned from the Department of Environment’s measures to hold private developers legally liable for improper disposal of hazardous materials in residential communities. That said, while the elimination of the Blue Bag program ushered in the more popular Blue Cart program, it has not been implemented across the entire city, with some of Chicago’s most blighted neighborhoods still without recycling services. And while many have looked favorably upon Daley’s Chicago Climate Action Plan, funding for such a plan remains a question in many people’s minds. Furthermore, the plan raises cause for concern, as it in no way provides solutions for the very specific health hazards Chicago’s air poses to residents, particularly those living in the communities of Little Village and Pilsen who are at risk for disease or death as a result of the poisonous gases emitted from neighboring coal-powered plants.

Several environmental challenges will face Chicago’s next mayor. Can the city emphasize rail transit and reduce use of the clogged road system? Can the city better manage its use of water in and around the city? Will the city develop a sustainable waste management program including effective recycling for all wards? How will the city cope with air pollution and carbon emissions in the future? Can we eradicate food deserts and provide all residents with safe food, water, air, and housing in the future?

Many challenges remain. Identifying and addressing them will be important for residents, administrators, the City Council, and the candidates for mayor. Roosevelt University’s Sustainability Studies program trains students to evaluate existing urban systems and consider ways of optimizing our use of energy, water, wastes, food, and the land, and our students will participate in discussions to make Chicago more sustainable in both the present and future. For information on our program, visit our Sustainability Studies website, call 1-877-277-5978 (1-877-APPLY RU) or email applyRU@roosevelt.edu.

Will any of the candidates for mayor in the 2011 election take up Daley’s ambition to make Chicago the most environmentally friendly city in the nation? Will citizens demand this when they go to the voting booths? What Daley’s successor does and does not do may give clarity to his accomplishments in this crucial aspect of city governance.

[Originally posted by rusust on Sept 8th 2010 on Sustainability Studies @ Roosevelt University]

Here’s how recycling in Chicago works now—or, rather, how it doesn’t:

If you live in a residential building with four or fewer units, you’re supposed to put your recyclables into blue carts and set them out by your trash every two weeks—though in some areas pickup has been slowed to once every three weeks, and in most neighborhoods there are no blue carts yet. If you don’t have a blue cart, you can take your recyclables to one of the city’s 33 drop-off centers and hope the bins there aren’t already too full.

If, on the other hand, you live in a building with more than four units, your garbage is picked up by private waste haulers. Your landlord is required by law to offer recycling service, but most don’t and the city rarely enforces that law. If your hauler isn’t recycling, you can press the building owner to comply with the law, but he doesn’t really have to fear being fined for violating it. Or you can take your stuff to one of those 33 drop-off centers and hope the bins there aren’t already too full.

If the place you work recycles, maybe you can haul small amounts of recycling in on your commute. If you live adjacent to a neighborhood that has the blue carts, maybe you can slip your recycling into the ones across the street, if they’re not already too full—but don’t get caught, because it’s illegal. If you live next to a park, or visit the airports regularly, maybe you can take your materials to their plentiful recycling bins.

Or you can do what most Chicagoans do: say to hell with it.

Right now just 8 percent of the waste from the 600,000 homes with city garbage service is being recycled, according to a study commissioned by the city’s Department of Environment. The number is 19 percent for buildings with private service. Based on previous studies and the success of recycling programs in Seattle, the report concludes that the city could readily raise both figures above 40 percent by investing in infrastructure and educating the public. (San Francisco’s current goal, for comparison, is zero waste by 2020.)

“People are really frustrated,” says Mike Nowak, president of the Chicago Recycling Coalition, an advocacy group. “We’ve got this multitiered system right now, so it’s no wonder people are confused. And it prevents the city from educating people about recycling because there are so many caveats.”

On May 2, 2008, when city officials killed the underperforming blue bag program, they promised to replace it with a new system of curbside pickup—the blue cart program. They also vowed to find new ways to bring recycling to the thousands of businesses and larger residential buildings that were never served by the blue bag program in the first place. “This is a day to celebrate,” Suzanne Malec-McKenna, commissioner for the city’s Department of Environment, said at the time. “We have accomplished much, but we also understand we have a lot of work to do.”

And on September 18 of that year the city reaffirmed its commitment to recycling when it released a road map for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The Climate Action Plan, as it’s known, listed waste reduction and recycling as a top priority. “Rapid Blue Cart expansion will help reduce the amount of waste produced, while allowing the waste that is produced to be safely returned to nature,” the plan stated. “Major steps to educate the public about this and other aspects of Chicago’s waste reduction initiative are being planned.”

Two years later, Chicago’s recycling programs are a confusing mess—to residents, recycling advocates, aldermen, and even city employees who work on waste management.

City officials say they don’t have the money to expand the blue cart program and don’t believe a crackdown on businesses and landlords will improve recycling in buildings that use private waste haulers—which, by the way, account for nearly twice as much garbage as the homes served by the city. They say that behind the scenes they’re exploring all sorts of options for reducing waste and increasing recycling.

But political will remains at least as big an obstacle to moving forward, according to several officials in the city’s environment and Streets and Sanitation departments who spoke to me on condition that I not use their names.

The Daley administration is on the defensive, insisting it’s doing all it can in bad economic times but refusing to share information with the public or even members of the City Council. My request for an interview to discuss recycling with Department of Environment or Streets and San policy makers was ignored, but multiple sources told me it was rejected on direct orders from the mayor’s press office. A few questions I e-mailed to the departments were answered with canned responses, though most others were also ignored.

All the unnamed sources in this story said they could be fired for talking to me. But they reached out anyway because they’re frustrated that the mayor and other top city leaders haven’t made recycling a priority—and, worse, that these top leaders have worked hard to keep discussion of it “closed off and away from people,” as one source put it.

In April city officials quietly released the results of a pair of studies they’d commissioned to help them figure out how to reduce the amount of garbage produced in Chicago. One, a “waste characterization study,” sampled trash around the city to determine what Chicagoans are throwing out. It found that we produced about 7.7 million tons of waste in 2007, most of it metals, paper, food and yard waste, plastics, used clothing, and construction and demolition (C & D) debris like concrete and steel.

The other, a “waste diversion study,” analyzed what’s happening to the city’s garbage after it’s picked up. It determined that most C & D debris is recycled and reused—as much as 65 percent, the result of a 2005 city ordinance as well as demand for the materials in the marketplace.

But the study also found that even with the high recycling rate for C & D debris, most of Chicago’s waste ends up in landfills: 56 percent of metals from homes and businesses, 69 percent of discarded paper, 96 percent of food and yard waste, 96 percent of plastics, and almost all clothing.

The study authors, from a consulting and engineering firm called CDM, offered city officials some straightforward recommendations: offer blue carts citywide, provide more opportunities for residents to recycle clothing and compost organic waste, launch education and outreach programs, and start enforcing recycling laws already on the books. (The studies cost $494,250, about half of which was covered by grants, the rest by funds drawn from the city budget.)

But Chicago isn’t close to making these recommendations happen in any comprehensive way.

From 1993 to 1998 the city asked the residents served by its garbage crews—those who live in “low-density” buildings with four or fewer units—to separate their recyclables into blue trash bags and toss them in with the rest of the garbage. Officials said the blue bags would be separated out at state-of-the-art sorting facilities that cost taxpayers $60 million to build, and the recyclables would be delivered to the appropriate firms.

After an initial wave of interest, though, participation dropped rapidly. And while officials claimed for the first several years that the program was keeping as much as 30 percent of the waste from low-density households out of landfills, city data showed that less than 10 percent of commodities like paper, plastic, metal, and glass were recycled. What’s more, that 10 percent only accounted for about 2.4 percent of the city’s total waste stream anyway.

By the time the Daley administration decided to bag blue bags for good in 2008, the program had cost taxpayers more than $200 million, and recycling rates in most of the city were as low as they’d been since the launch of the program.

City officials refused to call it a failure—even in announcing its demise, Streets and San commissioner Michael Picardi said the city had good reasons for sticking with it so long. “That was the state of the art at the time,” he said, while curbside pickup “is state of the art now.”

Picardi said it would take up to three years to expand the blue cart program citywide because the city couldn’t immediately afford all the new employees, trucks, and carts it would need. “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.”

Alderman Joe Moore of the 49th Ward says that was a mistake. “If they’d rolled the program out more quickly, it could have gotten established across the city,” he says. “Instead, it transformed the city into haves and have-nots.”

By incrementally adding wards, then chunks of wards, the city managed to offer the program to about 241,000 households in different parts of the city. But last summer budget officials told administrators they couldn’t hire any more workers, and a halt to the blue cart rollout was made public during City Council budget hearings last fall.

Aldermen whose wards never got carts weren’t happy, and they continue to take heat from constituents who are angry that they’re not getting the same city services as other residents.

“I’m getting letters from kids asking me when they’re getting their blue carts,” says Alderman Scott Waguespack. He’s one of the lucky ones: most of his 32nd Ward has the program. But parts of it don’t.

“People who don’t have blue carts will sit there and say, ‘Come on—this is ridiculous,’ and they look at us, the aldermen, as the ones not capable of pulling it together,” Waguespack says. “And you go into these meetings with the administration people and you’re told, ‘Alderman, we’re trying to do this.’ I try to believe them, but man, how many times do you have to go to the till before you think, ‘I don’t believe a thing you guys are saying to me’?”

“I hear about it every day: ‘Where are our blue carts?’” says Moore, whose ward isn’t yet part of the blue cart program. “What other city service do we have where one-third of the city gets the service and the other two-thirds don’t? It’s almost worse, quite frankly, than not having it anywhere. The city can’t publicize the program anywhere because not everyone has it, so that affects participation in the areas that do have it. It’s a completely half-assed approach to this.”

“There’s been no city leadership on this whatsoever,” continues Moore, who’s been advocating for improved recycling since the 1990s. “Remember that it took years before the city finally coughed up the information showing no one was really recycling under the blue bag program. They don’t want information to get out there.”

Last month Alderman Tom Allen, whose 38th Ward also lacks blue carts, convened a City Council hearing on expanding the program.

At the hearing, says Allen, “my objective was to pursue some answers and put the spotlight back on it and respond to the people in my ward who are angry. When I called for that meeting, other aldermen were eager to sign on. Those wards that don’t have recycling, the public has demanded responses from them. You can’t apportion city services in a way that’s disproportionate.”

The aldermen got to blow off steam, but the meeting didn’t produce much else. Current Streets and San commissioner Tom Byrne, whose department oversees the daily operations of the blue cart program, skipped it. And the aldermen didn’t settle on any specific proposals for funding blue cart expansion, though Allen floated a number of ideas—including dipping into tax increment financing funds, everyone’s new favorite nest egg.

Allen also says the city should consider tapping into unused funds set aside for property tax rebates or beating the bushes for corporate sponsorship. Coca-Cola recently paid for about 1,200 recycling bins in Philadelphia.

Earlier this month the Sun-Times’s Fran Spielman reported that stacks upon stacks of blue carts—about 22,000—are stored in a warehouse on the far south side. City employees had been shopping the story around because they’re furious that the administration hasn’t moved faster.

City officials told me privately that Streets and San purchased the carts, at about $45 apiece, for the next phase of rolling out the program, but then was ordered last year not to go forward with it.

Streets and San spokesman Matt Smith was more circumspect when he e-mailed me in response to several questions I’d asked him via e-mail and voice mail. “We have been using the carts we have on hand to maintain our current service area,” he wrote.

He added that the new carts would not be distributed to households that aren’t already part of the program. “Yes, large quantities of carts can be a big cost up front. But drivers, laborers, equipment and maintenance are reoccurring costs that will exist and increase over the long haul.”

Experts say recycling should save money over time, because recyclable commodities can be sold for money while municipalities have to pay to bury trash in landfills. Chicago now gets $31-$47 a ton for its recyclables while it costs $26-$35 a ton to landfill—not counting trucking expenses. That’s a difference of $57, at a minimum, for every ton of waste that’s recycled.

But Smith says these figures are too fluid to count on. “The savings you discuss depend upon a number of factors which are not certain,” he wrote. He didn’t respond to questions about the specific costs of trucks, labor, and other program expenses.

Aldermen say they’re still waiting for answers to some of these same questions.

Sources from inside the city tell me officials are considering a number of scenarios to pay for a blue cart expansion. One of them involves shifting Streets and San staff around, or possibly even reorganizing garbage pickup, so more labor is available for recycling collection. But the sources say top city officials are wary of upsetting aldermen, who they fear would resist any plan that lessens their control over everyday services. “Aldermen want to keep the old ward system in place,” one source says.

Another possibility would be turning over recycling collection to a private company. It would almost certainly make the blue cart program more economical—Chicago spends far more on the labor and equipment for its waste management systems than most municipalities. But my sources say top officials have balked because they’re not sure it’s worth a fight with organized labor or the political costs of defending another privatization deal in the City Council, which took a lot of heat for privatizing street parking last year.

The blue cart program is already partially privatized, though. Currently city employees driving city trucks collect recycling every couple weeks, then take it to a city-owned facility whose operations have been outsourced to a private firm, Allied Waste. There materials are loaded onto trucks owned by another private company, Resource Management, and transported to its center in Chicago Ridge, where they’re sorted by type of material and sold to other private companies that use the materials to manufacture other products. (City trucks take a small amount of the recyclables directly to the Resource Management facility.)

And the idea of privatizing curbside recycling pickup predates the parking meter deal, the Skyway deal, and the failed Midway deal. It even predates Mayor Daley’s first term.

It was 1987 when Harold Washington first proposed enlisting private firms to pick up recyclables from homes served by city garbage crews. Washington died before implementing the plan, and in 1989 the new Mayor Daley put the kibosh on it in favor of a four-ward pilot program that used Streets and San employees instead.

Within a couple years he’d ditched that program for the blue bag program, conceived by connections at the private firm Waste Management. Not surprisingly, Waste Management was subsequently hired to fish the blue bags out of the trash, at a cost to taxpayers of tens of millions of dollars a year.

Now Daley is circling back to Washington’s original proposal.

According to the study results released by the city this spring, just 14 percent of the city’s waste is produced by the homes served by city garbage crews. About 61 percent comes from the C & D sector, whose efforts are one of the city’s few recycling success stories.

The other 25 percent comes from businesses and what the city refers to as high-density residential buildings—those with more than four units, for which garbage collection and recycling are already in the private sector.

For the last 20 years recycling in these buildings has been an even lower priority for the Daley administration.

In 1993 the City Council passed the Chicago High Density Residential and Commercial Source Reduction and Recycling Ordinance, better known as the Burke-Hansen ordinance, after the aldermen who sponsored it. It requires that building owners set up recycling for at least three kinds of materials. If they don’t, the city can issue warnings, impose fines of $100 a day, or take away the business licenses of retailers and offices.

In practice, however, the ordinance is almost meaningless, because city officials quickly decided that they didn’t want to alienate property owners and building managers by enforcing it. The city didn’t inspect high-density or commercial buildings to see if they had recycling plans until 2004. Most didn’t, but even then the city didn’t impose any penalties. “We don’t believe that beating them up with tickets is the way to accomplish this,” Matt Smith told me in 2005.

In 2007 and 2008, as pressure mounted on the city to replace blue bags with blue carts for low-density residences, 46th Ward alderman Helen Shiller tried to force some movement on business and high-density recycling. Shiller, whose ward includes scores of high-density buildings, argued at the time that Burke-Hansen was ineffective because it didn’t take into account buildings where landlords and tenants might not be able to afford their own recycling programs. “The current ordinance uses the same plan and generalizes the city as a whole,” she said. “We need to measure what people are already doing and get other people involved who want to do it.”

With a nudge from Shiller, city officials asked the U.S. EPA to fund a study of what recycling programs were already under way in high-density buildings in her ward. After a year of tracking garbage generation and recycling at 20 different buildings—some recycled more than a quarter of their trash from the outset, while others struggled to recycle anything—the city Department of Environment and its consultants summarized their findings in a report completed in 2009.

Perhaps not surprisingly, they concluded that there’s no one-size-fits-all model for multiunit buildings—they all have different trash haulers and property managers, different amounts of space to store recyclables, and residents with a wide range of interest and motivation. The report argues that residents, managers, and waste haulers for each building have to work together to come up with a plan. It also emphasizes that nothing is as important as launching an education campaign to let people know how and why to participate.

“Residents must be kept updated on the recycling program or can become discouraged that their recycling efforts are not making a difference,” the report says—a point that critics also made about the blue bag program during its darkest days. “The Project found that buildings should explain their waste and recycling practices, especially to new residents, in multiple ways. In addition to the tools already being used for existing residents (such as posters and container signage), new tenant lease inserts, flyers, or pledge cards help new tenants begin recycling immediately.”

Out of the study came a “tool kit,” subsequently posted on the city’s website, that offers residents and managers concrete steps for how to start a recycling program.

At the same time, the city put together a “recycling task force” made up of aldermen, recycling advocates, waste haulers, and city officials to revise Burke-Hansen. The agenda included issues like what kinds of materials should be required to be recycled, how performance would be monitored, whether there should be different standards for different sizes or types of buildings, and what kinds of incentives should be in place—as well as what kinds of penalties. Shiller predicted that the task force would produce a draft of a new ordinance by the end of last summer.

Instead it imploded. City officials tell me recycling advocates were uncompromising; recycling advocates say the city wouldn’t commit to penalties for reluctant building owners and waste haulers. Burke-Hansen was never rewritten, and it still isn’t enforced. “We prefer the carrot over the stick,” one city official told me.

While the 46th Ward study was under way, top city environmental officials began looking into a citywide solution to the high-density recycling problem. In the summer and fall of 2008 they showed waste haulers, building management groups, and business leaders a proposal to scrap the private hauling system for a new one that shifted power to the city. Rather than each apartment building or commercial property negotiating its own deal with a waste hauler, the city government would divide Chicago into as many as 20 zones and hand out an “exclusive franchise,” through a competitive bidding process, to a single hauler in each. The company operating in each zone would be responsible for picking up and landfilling the trash as well as sorting out and recycling certain reusable materials.

Proponents with the city said the plan was based on successful systems in cities like Portland, Oregon, with far higher recycling rates than Chicago. They said reducing the number of waste haulers in each area would reduce the number of trucks and the number of pickup routes, thereby cutting fuel emissions—as well as the cost of recycling collection. With fewer trucks on the road, taxpayers would spend less on street and alley repairs, and the bidding process would yield lower garbage disposal fees. “Right now there is an unbelievable disparity in the prices and services for customers—for the exact same service right down the street,” Malec-McKenna, the environment commissioner, said at the time. “It’s just price gouging.”

Not surprisingly, the National Solid Wastes Management Association called the proposal garbage. Waste haulers—some of whom would lose out under the city’s plan—argued that Chicago’s thousands of businesses and buildings had unique needs, depending on their location and the type of trash they produced, and simply couldn’t be served by a single hauler (or charged a uniform fee) over a broad area. The trade group even set up a website to counter many of the city’s claims, arguing, among other things, that cities with similar systems paid far more than Chicago for garbage collection and recycling.

The waste haulers are a deep-pocketed and powerful group, and with the backing of several local business groups they managed to kill the idea. City officials told me recently they still think it’s a good one but that it won’t be revived any time soon because there’s no interest in a costly political war with industry and trade groups. “It isn’t worth the effort,” one city official says.

Which leaves high-density recycling right about where it was before any of these conversations started. Shiller says the “tool kit” that came out of the pilot project in her ward has enabled hundreds of residential buildings, mostly on the north lakefront, to develop recycling programs. But most of the waste from high-density buildings across the city is still going into landfills.Thanks in part to the informal recycling economy—e.g., Dumpster scavengers—buildings with private collection are keeping about 75 percent of their aluminum waste out of landfills. But the rates for plastic and food waste are close to zero.

“There was that little experiment in Helen Shiller’s ward that seemed quite promising, and we sort of piggybacked on it, but there was no follow-through,” says Joe Moore, whose 49th Ward also includes a lot of high-density residences. “We had a little success on a volunteer basis . . . especially with condo associations. But my office just doesn’t have the resources to continue that on a regular basis, and volunteers are volunteers.”

Shiller says the high-density push petered out when the blue cart program stalled: “It’s hard to place demands on the private sector when the public sector isn’t moving.”

She predicts that will change in the next few months as the market for recycled materials continues to improve. “Now most waste haulers are offering recycling, and that wasn’t the case before,” she said. “This is not about a lack of intent—everyone wants to do recycling. We’ll figure something out.”

There is some room for optimism on all of this. In lieu of curbside programs or a coherent high-density policy, the city has created 33 recycling drop-off centers that are well used, to the point where they’re often overflowing. In fact, two south-side aldermen recently proposed fining suburbanites who sneak into Chicago to dump their recyclables at city-owned drop-off facilities. From the beginning of the year through the end of May, 1,900 tons of recyclables have been left at the sites, according to Matt Smith.

Recent changes to city and state law have made composting more feasible. The city’s website offers tutorials, even for apartment dwellers, and several new commercial composting ventures are opening on the far south side.

But for many people—even those with a deep interest in recycling—the city’s current web of programs and possibilities is too difficult to navigate.

Two years ago, as the city was phasing out the blue bag program, a family friend asked 42nd Ward resident Dina Demetrio why she wasn’t recycling. “I said, ‘No one in the Gold Coast recycles,’” she says.

She soon learned from friends that plenty of people did—but most of them lived in high-rise buildings with in-house programs. Demetrio, who lives in a single-family home with her husband and two young children, called 311, the city’s information line, and asked how she was supposed to recycle. She was told to put her recyclables into blue bags and set them out with the rest of her garbage.

So she did. She even made special trips to a grocery store she didn’t normally shop at because it sold blue bags. But something bothered her.

“I never saw anybody else using the blue bags,” she says.

There was a good reason for that, of course, but if Demetrio wasn’t up on the news she was also intent on doing her part. She kept blue bagging, but also called “the mayor’s office, my alderman’s office, everybody” to try to find out what was up. She says no one could tell her whether stuff in blue bags was still being recycled. Even the city sanitation crews who came to pick up her trash encouraged her to stick with it, she says, and promised her “we’d be getting the blue carts soon.”

Finally, earlier this month, Demetrio managed to reach someone in the city’s environment department who broke the news to her: no, blue bagged materials haven’t been recycled since late 2008. The employee suggested that Demetrio drive the recyclables to one of the city’s drop-off sites. Since there aren’t any in the Gold Coast, she’d probably want to take them to the South Loop, Lincoln Park, or Old Town.

Demetrio was ticked off. “It’s such a waste,” she says. “This obviously isn’t a priority.”

Yet she remains a believer in recycling, and during her recent conversations with city officials they asked her to volunteer as a “recycling captain” and tell others in her neighborhood how they can recycle. It’s often a hard sell. “What I’ve found is that people have no faith that the city is really going to do it,” she says.

Demetrio maintains that something good has come out of her experiences: “Even though I’m irritated about this,” she says, “my two- and three-year-old children have learned that paper and glass don’t go in the garbage.” Maybe by the time they’re renting their first apartments, Chicago will have a coherent recycling strategy.

[Originally posted by Mick Dumke on July 22nd 2010 in The Chicago Reader]