Chicago STILL Can’t Recycle
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(December 8, 2020) Earlier this week, I received an email from friend of the show Ald. Scott Waguespack of Chicago’s 32nd Ward. He was writing to tell me about a report just issued by Chicago’s Office of the Inspector General about recycling in commercial and residential high rises in the City. Its official title is Department of Streets and Sanitation Commercial and High-Density Residential Recycling Enforcement Audit and you can read the whole thing yourself by clicking on that link. But it’s conclusion isn’t surprising: Chicago still can’t recycle.
Or you can get a summary from Madison Hopkins at the Better Government Association.
The city of Chicago is failing to enforce a three-year-old law requiring big building owners to provide recycling to nearly half the city’s 2.7 million residents, the city’s top watchdog reported on Wednesday.
The finding is another in the city’s long history of waste management failures that make Chicago garbage among the least recycled of any city in the nation.
In a 32-page audit, Inspector General Joseph Ferguson slammed city government for almost never issuing citations and failing to even keep track of bigger buildings that don’t offer private recycling services to tenants as required.
The reason I quote Hopkins is because she has been chronicling Chicago’s epic recycling failures for several years. We had her on the show in 2018 and again in 2019 to talk about articles she wrote for the BGA. Both of those stories reveal the sad state of what is laughably called the City of Chicago’s recycling program.
It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about blue carts behind neighborhood homes or larger containers next to high rises–Chicago’s attempts at recycling have been a disaster for decades. It doesn’t seem to matter who is mayor, and it doesn’t seem to matter what kind of laws are passed by City Council. So perhaps, as the OIG has done, it’s time to look more closely at the Department of Streets and Sanitation (DSS) and the role it has played in this epic failure.
Why do I care? For one thing, we report on environmental matters on this program. For another, for six years I was president of the Chicago Recycling Coalition. I wish I could say that I had an impact on City recycling policies. Sadly, if I did, it was something minor. But, like I said, even our mayors seem to have no effect on recycling policies.
Meanwhile, the Delta Institute is doing a study of Chicago’s waste and recycling policies. But that won’t come out until next year, and DSS says it will wait until then to implement any changes. Good Lord! Why not just wait until the sky turns green?
Alderman Waguespack and 43rd Ward Ald. Michele Smith join us today to discuss why Chicago STILL can’t recycle.