Chicago was built on garbage.
The politics of garbage has never vanished, nor has its odor substantially improved. The latest case in point is Chicago’s so-called blue-bag plan to meet state mandates to recycle more waste. Promoted as a bargain-basement, no-hassle solution to a big problem, it’s likely to balloon into a costly fiasco: a “recycling” plan that doesn’t seriously recycle and instead sets the stage for building massive, environmentally dangerous waste incinerators.
Even when new raw materials for making, say, newspapers or bottles are cheaper to come by than recycled discards, the savings gained by avoiding disposal can often justify recycling economically. But it’s an economy easy to overlook.
There is wealth in waste,
But the Northwest Incinerator, the world’s largest when it went into service in ’71, continues to burn about 20 percent of all of Chicago’s garbage. Now more than 20 years old, the Northwest Incinerator must soon be shut down or refurbished at a cost of $25 million, according to city estimates.
In the fall of 1989, the Department of Streets and Sanitation tested a limited recycling plan in four wards. Residents were asked to put metal cans, glass bottles, and milk-jug-style plastic containers in reusable blue plastic boxes. In large part because the plan did not include newspapers (the heaviest recyclables) and because there was no modification of the union contract requiring three workers on each garbage truck (nonprofit recyclers use one worker), the cost per ton recycled averaged $672, more than six times what the city pays the Resource Center and Uptown Recycling, both not-for-profits, for their curbside collection.
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Streets and San officials became increasingly interested in a recycling plan employing plastic bags and the city’s compactor garbage trucks. (There had been some discussion in professional journals of using plastic bags instead of the more traditional reusable boxes, and a few cities were testing them.) Deputy Commissioner Tim Harrington says, “I wouldn’t be so bold as to say I initiated the whole program, but I pushed it to the forefront.”
