May 2, 2008 1:38 pm US/Central
City To Bag The Blue Bag Program
CHICAGO (STNG) ―
After more than a decade of failure and denial, Chicago is giving up the ghost on blue bag recycling.
By the end of 2011, every one of the 600,000 households that get city garbage pick-up will make the shift to suburban-style curbside recycling from blue carts, instead of bags.
The blue cart program is currently confined to 84,000 households. Beginning next month and continuing through year's end, 92,000 additional households will get the perk.
That will be followed by an accelerated expansion to roughly 140,000 homes a year. The failed blue bag program will be totally phased out by 2011.
Until then, homeowner and renters still waiting for blue carts will be asked to take recyclables to regional drop-off centers.
Chicago currently has 16 drop-off centers. By Dec. 31, there will be twice that many -- and they will be concentrated in neighborhoods without blue carts.
Blue bags will not be outlawed. But they will be strongly discouraged.
"People who operate these sorting centers and transfer stations are required by permit to pull anything that comes in a blue bag and recycle it. But we don't think that's the best way to go," said Streets & Sanitation Dept. spokesman Matt Smith.
"We would be putting good money after bad to continue to fund a program we're evolving away from. Rather than let that slow the progress of blue carts, we're eliminating paying for sorting and using those funds to move forward with the blue cart."
Last fall, Mayor Daley postponed what few sweeteners there were in his 2008 budget -- hiring 50 police officers and expanding curbside recycling to 131,000 more households -- to pave the way for rolling back his proposed $108 million property tax hike.
The mayor put off the blue cart expansion until July 1, meaning that far fewer households would have made the switch.
Now, City Hall has done an about-face -- forging ahead with a curbside program it once dismissed as cost prohibitive. And how will it be financed?
"We're going to stop paying for resorting of recyclables. That's money we can use to pay for the program. We are also going to be taking in more money through the sale of recyclables in the blue cart areas," Smith said, without revealing specific dollar amounts.
For more than a decade, Chicagoans have been asked to place plastics, cans, bottles and paper into blue bags and toss them in with routine garbage. The program has been a collossal flop. Only 13 percent of city residents bother to participate and an even lower percentage of their recyclables are actually diverted from the city's 1.2 million tons of trash a year.
The Chicago Recycling Coalition applauded Mayor Daley for facing reality. The group opposed blue bag recycling from the start and called the city's about-face "vindication" for its persistent opposition.
(Source: Sun-Times News Group Wire © Chicago Sun-Times 2009. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)
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