“It’s a classic example of the public will being thwarted” by intransigent business interests, says Howard Learner of Business and Professional People for the Public Interest (BPI). More likely, say others, it’s a classic example of environmentalists not being able to tell when they’ve won.
In 1988 and 1989 legislators required all counties, including Cook, to start developing plans for recycling at least 15 percent of their garbage in three years and 25 percent in five years. But these laws don’t seem to have given the counties enough incentive to stay on schedule. To date only one county (Lake) has proceeded at the pace it should; the others, according to Kevin Greene of Citizens for a Better Environment, have been planning slowly or without public participation, or have treated the 15 to 25 percent goals as ceilings rather than floors.
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Environmentalists, meanwhile, want more than the law currently gives them, which is essentially the power to block new landfills. Dale Berry, spokesman for an environmental group called the McHenry County Defenders, says that Senate Bill 172 “is only a defense, not an offense.” Environmentalists know that it’s easier to mobilize people to fight a proposed landfill than it is to get them to separate paper, glass, aluminum, and compostables for reuse, day in and day out. And that it’s easier to get people to recycle than it is to assure a market for those recyclables that have been saved. So they want the state to set up a system that will make recycling more feasible.
Neither task force reached the hoped-for consensus. To keep this story manageable, I’ll focus on the waste-reduction and recycling task force, which was somewhat more successful in that it came up with an intriguing market-driven framework for statewide recycling in Illinois. However, its members could not agree on how to pay for their plan, and then they positively fell apart over a seemingly small disagreement about recycling goals.
“All a ban does,” says Lieberman, “is either move the problem elsewhere or create a bureaucratic infrastructure–or both.” A ban on landfilling aluminum cans, which are readily recyclable, might work better. But it’s not usually considered good public policy to pass yet another unenforceable “paper law.” Like Prohibition or the 55-mile-an-hour speed limit, they tend to undermine respect for law in general.
The task force decided that Illinois would require local governments to meet specific recycling and reduction goals–and would supply them with money to help them get started. Then the state would use the lure of this guaranteed supply, along with other economic incentives, to attract factories using recycled newsprint, aluminum, glass, or plastic to locate or expand in Illinois. Once the state primed the pump, the theory went, recycling would eventually proceed on its own, fueled solely by the profit motive. In other words, once government got it going, this system would work on the pull of profit–not the push of detailed state regulations. Other pieces of the plan complemented this framework: state and local governments would buy more recycled goods, the state would require a reduction of toxic substances in packaging, and the state would set up a logo program (to identify recyclable items on store shelves) if no equivalent federal program had come along by 1993. (Those on the task force like to call this framework “market driven,” and so it is by comparison with legislative bans or taxes. But a more truly market-driven system would extend to the individual household–as it does in northwest-suburban Woodstock, where you pay for garbage collection by the bag: the more garbage, the bigger your bill.)
